There Are Things We Live Among : Essays on the Object World

Literary Nonfiction. Conversational, humane, and forthright, Jennifer Moxley brings her remarkable strengths as a poet to bear on the essay tradition. At once literary and personal, THERE ARE THINGS WE LIVE AMONG follows the thread connecting texts and objects in her life, from her girlhood saddle to her mother's sewing machine, from her favorite books to an old set of frying pans. As she suggests, these things serve variously as accomplishments, talismans, fetishes, and keepers of lost life. Our attachments prove as diverse as our possessions, and yet, in the words of George Oppen that open these essays, "to see them / Is to know ourselves."