In the wake of a pandemic, what I find most prescient in Kisner’s book is this: she does not recommend interjecting oneself into thin places as a recipe for self-help or as the cure for all that ails you. In the other, we thrive, or at least we believe we do. We are the frogs in the science experiment who do not realize the water is incrementally warming and will eventually boil us to death, or we are the goldfish in the bowl with no sense of what water is at all - it’s simply what is. If she sometimes gets lost down rhetorical rabbit holes, at least she makes you want to go with her, pulling the reader along on her journey to excavate the intimate from the observed.In Thin Places, Kisner presents a collection of personal musings and reported pieces that burrow into foxholes that may best be understood as worlds within worlds, like a Shaker community, a hyper-sensory media installation, and a morgue.įor Kisner, the universe seems chock full with places both internal and external that, depending on our approach to them, render us frighteningly claustrophobic or as free as we could dream of being. Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in this book, bouncing nimbly between gravity.and comic relief, which she peppers in just when our heads are starting to spin. Reading the book, one might picture a series of oppositions - religious/secular, straight/gay, native/foreign, self/other, even living/dead - with Kisner’s focus always on the slash. In a new-New-Journalist amalgam of reportage and memoir, Kisner tethers - more elegantly in some pieces than in others - her sociological dispatches to the realm of personal experience: her on-again-off-again relationship with God, her O.C.D., her mixed ethnicity and sexuality.

Certainty, the book suggests, is an illusion.

'in between state' is the common denominator of this collection, the theme on which the 13 essays are a variation. Kisner is one of the most perceptive, open-minded and capable literary tour guides I’ve encountered in quite some time, and I’m already looking forward to her next (ad)venture. remarkably polished and demonstrably articulate. Her efforts to unpack her relationship with her mother, her Mexican American heritage and her queer identity are some of the most earnest and impactful passages in the book. What makes this collection so compulsively readable is Kisner’s ability to wield her contagious curiosity and nose for objective reporting to investigate everything from a once bustling, now mostly abandoned lakeside oasis in Southern California, to Ann Hamilton’s magical and enveloping multimedia installation at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2012, to evangelical robocalls. This idea of duality or 'in-betweenness' is a fascinating and culturally salient concept - and one that ripples through every piece in the book. fiercely intelligent and consistently edifying.

Thin places kisner