spuytenduyvil

Em’s dog walks in Govans, a Baltimore city neighborhood, bring her into contact with Danny, a neighborhood resident who cannot resolve his history, especially the hidden parts of his past. Their friendship crosses racial lines in a city in which the geography has historically reinforced a divide. Nature is the force that makes their paths cross, and reconciles the long past with the present, the traumatically lost with what can be brought to a state of peace, and this specific location with the diverse human lives that inhabit it.

Antje Rauwerda's Slow Time is technically form-shattering in a significant way—meaning that it changes what's possible for a fiction writer to do.  And in doing that, it opens up a whole new pathway to the hidden heart of a city.

     Madison Smartt Bell

 

Antje Rauwerda has created a world—no, a cosmos—in an urban Baltimore neighborhood, inhabited by an unlikely network of relations so far reaching in time and place that, by the end, readers, too, will come to regard themselves as kin. How could we not, when the land is speaking so tenderly and so urgently about how we all might extend our consciousness and unstopper our senses? Slow time is a time known by the earth and by our inmost selves,  a patience and a power, an endlessly creative drive reconnecting us to our stories, to our original wholeness.  Nothing closes down in Rauwerda’s stunning, lyrical vision; the possibility for repair, the imaginative work of repair could—absolutely could—be undertaken by us all, if only we learn to listen across human-constructed divides, and to trust what we hear in response.

     Lia Purpura