Small Altars

＂A book that bends time and fragments narrative. On the surface, Small Altars appears to narrate the story of two brothers, offering a singular portrayal of grief, loss, and the quiet violence inherent in adolescence. Gardiner considers the powerlessness of his narrator as he comes of age against a backdrop of comic books, piano lessons, and family secrets. At the same time, Small Altars explores-through form, style, and technique-precisely how memory works. By eschewing the impulse to rely strictly on chronology as a structural device, Gardiner instead creates a provocative fragmentation of time, meaning, and narrative. He interrogates our use of story to lend unity and cohesion to what are essentially discontinuous experiences, to find meaning in loss, grief, and their indelible aftermath. ＂--

Justin Gardiner is the author of Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, as well as the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University, and he serves as the nonfiction editor of The Southern Humanities Review.