Liz Scheid's THE SHAPE OF BLUE

WINNER OF LIT PUB’S 1ST ANNUAL PROSE CONTEST

“I’ve tried to etch together a blueprint, a map to navigate loss and motherhood, a pamphlet for survival, but the truth is: there’s no such thing. That would be too predictable. When I was small, I used to spin the globe with my finger pressed into one spot with my eyes closed, and when it stopped I was supposed to read the place where my finger hand pressed and that would be the place I lived as an adult. Most of the time I ended up in the middle of the ocean—vast blue space. There’s so much that can’t be explained. But the beauty is before the discovery, the moments spent wandering, exploring, getting lost. This is the wild.” —from “Room to Roam”

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PRAISE

“From the fabric of her own life, Liz Scheid creates an intricate tapestry that explores how we might cope with our fragile human situation, the chronic ache of separation and connectedness—of gathering and loss. ‘I feel as though I’ve been propelled inward,’ she writes at one point, and so does the reader, encountering Scheid’s overlapping worlds of imagination, memory, consciousness and scientific fact. This is a beautiful, brilliant book, clear and compelling—and profoundly moving.” —CORRINNE CLEGG HALES, author of To Make It Right

“The Shape of Blue is a stunning literary debut, a book that is both haunted and heroic; a masterful blend of science writing and lyrical, luminous personal reflection on fear and family, love and loss, and the sublime interstices between the things of this world. To read this book is to feel deliciously lost in language and fact, consistently surprised, even heartbroken at the emotional depths it reaches. Readers who appreciate the writing of Lia Purpura, Amy Leach, or Maggie Nelson will love Liz Scheid’s The Shape of Blue.” —STEVEN CHURCH, author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst

“Family is one thread in The Shape of Blue, but the book also deftly handles the intersection of birth and death, presence and absence. Scheid weaves ‘silver and beautiful’ associations that keenly depict the angles we use to navigate life in an exciting new collection that combines the lyric and the familiar.” —CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH, author of Bring Down the Little Birds

“A tender prose poem eulogy to her sister who died in a car accident, Liz Scheid’s The Shape of Blue explores death, grief, motherhood and anxiety with tender lyricism. With arresting imagery, she forges beautiful connections between snowflakes, EKGs, astronomy, paleontology and language. A deep and stunning book.” —MARIE CARTER, author of The Trapeze Diaries