The Book of Kin

“What if we survive by converting what we get into what we need?” asks Jennifer Bowen Hicks in a series of linked essays that offer care and attention as balm for our contemporary loneliness. The founding director of one of the most groundbreaking prison writing workshops in the United States, she has seen firsthand the effects of absence and isolation. Reading and writing, she posits, can be radically connective acts—proof, finally, that we’re not alone. Written during a time when division is constantly being sown between us, The Book of Kin argues powerfully for our need to understand ourselves and each other as full, complex beings worthy of love.

From the unexpectedly salvific attentions of a cow to the time-bending drama of watching a child grow into an adult, and from pastoral carceral settings to the spectacle of an antiquated prison rodeo, Bowen Hicks examines a wild spectrum of shapes that care can take—and what happens when its absence is marked. These unflinching, surprisingly funny, and emotionally vulnerable essays are driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various separations, or vanishments, in her own life—from the shadow of her own father to disappeared backyard chickens—and in American life writ large, where “harm is shared, and healing is too.” The Book of Kin is a rhapsodic debut that explores the beautiful, determined ways we imperfectly care for one another and how we might keep trying, despite it all.