Orange

“E.’s Orange is an outrageous leap into the discourse of grief, an enchanted toast to the complexities of the stories of self, low and high. Wryly wise and cheerfully grotesque, this compelling text is both blues and blueprint for a new territory.” — Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City, Mister Skylight & Run the Red Lights

“The most fun I’ve ever had reading a book. About a dead dog. While resting my hand on my own dog, seventeen years old, the entire time. The most invigorating experience I’ve ever had reading a book. Like going for a walk, or being taken on a walk and tugging to go faster, faster, and then stopping and turning, chasing, exploring for a while and then, oh yes, going forth again. The most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had reading a book, and perhaps the closest I may ever get to feeling what it feels like to be a dog(!?), while reading a very touching, very human, being’s thoughts, while resting my hand on my own dog’s head and holding her close while reading this book about a dead dog and crying, while laughing, because this is the most fun I’ve ever had reading a book so sad.” — Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart & Desire: A Haunting

“A dazzling Rubik’s Cube of a book where every solution is a right one. E. Briskin’s Orange is an extended meditation on grief and memory in diamond-precise language that allows for the liminality of human existence in all its inanity and largesse. E. writes: “It’s just a story. Don’t imagine I got over it.” I don’t imagine I’ll be over this book for quite some time, if ever. Ingenious.” — Brandi Homan, author of Burn Fortune & Bobcat Country

“My dog died today.”

So begins Orange, the first book by Seattle poet E. Briskin, in which a narrator of indeterminate gender mourns a dog of indeterminate species. The narrator may not be a reliable one, and the dog, outside of metaphor, may not exist.

With playful digressions into anecdote, the philosophy of consciousness, literature, and animal behavioral science, Orange is a book that queers genre, gender, and sequence. Its narrator — disconnected, mournful, comic, angry, irreverent, overwrought, and seemingly always in a coffee shop — ambles through a psyche twisted by loss. Written in a furrowed numbering scheme, Orange can be read in many directions.

Audio

Please see our audio page for a download which features additional readings from the book, as well as presenting it in the alternate reading order.