Poetry. Art. Does the body want to be a story? Does it always ask for "narrative repair?" What happens when people tell you about your family's suffering before your suffering tells you about itself? In this groundrepairing debut book, Christine Friedlander asks, "What if a long pause is all I know?" A stitch-up of poetry, visual collage, bandages, memoir, and anti-advice, AVANT GAUZE does not fill in. It fills around. Friedlander rejects the luridity of catharsis to discover gauze: a new form to weave around trauma and gazes and history, a radical redefinition of healing.
