Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes
by Martin Fielder
62 pages. Tape-bound.
Book design by Grant Ashcroft
Winner of The Cupboard’s First-Ever Contest
There are ghosts who have never died. Martin Fielder’s Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes is about such a person or maybe two such people. A mysterious name. A terrible job. The drudgery of the office makes ghosts of many, but can be survived with wit, imagination, and heart. Lorraine Nelson never lived, but in this volume, selected by Malcolm Tarrant as the winner of The Cupboard’s first contest, she’s given the elegy she deserves.
Of the volume, Tarrant writes that “it’s made up of surprising but complex asides, elaborated and compacted articulations that scale beautifully into a durable and brilliant skin, a chain mail of associative links and leaps. The language is massive and minute, mute and malleable. The whole piece performs the paradox, recombining the airy ephemeral with an adhesive that does, in fact, stick.”
About the Author
Martin Fielder’s poetry and nonfiction have received awards from the Utah Arts Council and have appeared in a number of journals and periodicals. He is an assistant professor/lecturer at the University of Utah where he was the editor-in-chief of Quarterly West from 2001 to 2005, and he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and their two boys. He still pulls the occasional crappy job.
Read an excerpt.