“What is the responsibility of ‘building a person’? rob mclennan's On Beauty accumulates searing questions, and delves into the deep memory of consciousness 'held in amber.' How might we wake from loss and conduct internal excavations? He writes: ‘The tricky part of our travel was in attempting to speak solo to my younger self. . . I woke before the narrative completed.’ Woven with threads of ancestral memoir, this collage of stories collects the habits of those attempting to swerve from conventions of elegy—and what comes 'after.' We proceed through glowing fragments: ‘paper dolls and Red Rose figurines. . . placed on every surface. Set out to safeguard.’ A deeply moving portrait, from embryonic scrapbooks and quotidian diaries to the many births which compose a life. A deft encounter with what happens when—'We won’t allow our dead to disappear.’” Laynie Browne, Intaglio Daughters
