Louis Bury, English Professor at Hostos Community College, gets personal in his new book, “The Way Things Go.”
Published in September by punctum books, the autobiographical work taps into memories and incorporates poetry and found documents to explore chronic illness, family trauma, and anticipatory grief — a term used to describe feelings of loss before it actually happens. In it, Bury also draws parallels to larger socio-political issues, reflecting on a future in which “things will be changed or lost.”
“The ‘I’d rather not think about it’ attitude that I had at the time struck me as similar to how people think about climate change,” he explained.
The process of writing the book was years in the making and included Bury slowly letting his family in on the
topics covered, particularly as they applied to his sister, who was diagnosed as a child with pediatric lupus and later struggled with addiction. “Early on when I was writing the book, in 2016-17, I felt it was important to air what I was writing about Emily with her,” he said. “Me sharing the writing with her really prepared some of the hard feelings that might have come up on both sides and strengthened our relationship along the way.”
Bury described the book as an honest, loving reflection on the desire to avoid uncomfortable realities. In the end, he says, it has helped his family have conversations about those realities.
“The Way Things Go” is comprised of seventy-one chapters, with each successive chapter decreasing in length by one sentence and culminating in a final, single-sentence — a technique influenced by the Oulipo, a group of French writers from the 1960s who imposed creative constraints in the process of writing to produce the “melting snowball” literary technique.
Born and raised in Staten Island, Bury earned his Ph.D. from CUNY’s Graduate Center and has been teaching at Hostos since 2014. He is also the author of “
Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint.” (Dalkey Archive, 2015) and a regular contributor to Hyperallergic, Art in America magazines, and BOMB Magazine.
“The Way Things Go” has enjoyed a positive reception from Bury’s peers and contemporaries, and he was interviewed by poet and scholar Michael Leong about it for
BOMB Magazine.
You can buy or download “The Way Things Go”
here.