NIGHT ROOMS

A writer digs into the past “to retrieve what was lost.”

Nutt follows up her debut poetry collection, Wilderness Champion, with her first book of prose, a spare gathering of 18 numbered, interrelated essays (a “personal canon”) comprised of memories held together by fragmentary, epigrammatic thoughts, images, and lists. Running throughout the text are references to literary works, word etymologies, and films, in particular monster or horror movies—zombie, vampire, slasher, etc.—which Nutt juxtaposes against confessional, often painful personal reflections. “Horror is a reaction, recognition, a response to a call,” she writes. Sorrow and death haunt her intimate “map of the bereaved”—especially the suicides in Nutt’s family: her father-in-law, uncle, and great uncle—and quiet ruminating and somber musing abound. “If we attach ourselves to art,” writes the author, “maybe art can attach itself to us….I am making a lineage of what lingers.” Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? lurks in the background as Nutt ponders her experiences as a participant in child beauty pageants. “Each sec­ond,” she writes, “tilted toward another chance to prove I was charming and beautiful.” Wondering if anyone died in the house she lived in, she thinks about visiting a website that provides such information but decides against it, “too afraid to know.” The author’s descriptions of relationships—childhood, family, friends, sexual—weave in and out, like walking into different rooms to experience what is there, try to understand it, feel it, question it, and then move on to another room. She worries that “despair is contagious and if I’m not careful I’ll infect everyone around me.” Putting together her book, piece by piece, is an act of belief, as Nutt tries “to write my own self back” from the dead. Here, “survival is attached to telling.” Although obtuse and rambling at times, the strange, uncanny prose rhythms created in these essays are affecting, like lucid dreams.

Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation.