This One Will Hurt You

Essayist Crenshaw (coauthor of Text, Mind, and World: An Introduction to Literary Criticism) explores in his tender solo debut growing up and living in rural America and coming to terms with unsettling memories. In the opening essay, “After the Ice,” Crenshaw eloquently recounts his nephew’s brutal death at the hands of the boy’s stepfather, weaving this tragedy into an evocation of Arkansas’s stark winter landscape and a reflection on the malleability of memory. The following essays examine literature—for example, Denis Johnson and Flannery O’Connor’s works—and significant regional history, both recent and long ago. “Cold” looks at crystal meth’s emergence and devastating effects on his former hometown of Booneville, Ark., combining elegy with critique. “Girl on the Third Floor” discusses a local landmark, the sprawling, now abandoned Nyberg Building, on whose grounds he and his mother once lived, tracing it back to the late 19th- and early 20th-century boom in building tuberculosis sanitariums. Crenshaw’s evocative descriptions of place—the Nyberg stands “among the surrounding pine trees like an undiscovered city or an old monument carved to forgotten gods”—balances well with his confessional style. Throughout this fine collection, Crenshaw proves a deeply self-reflective narrator, able to expose his innermost worries while remaining keenly aware of the world around him.[em] (Feb.) [/em]