Unpleasantries

Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quicklyΓÇöskiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highwaysΓÇöSoos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of ΓÇ£thinking and doingΓÇ¥ onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations move from fly-fishing in dangerously swift Alaska rivers to memories of the liars and dirty-joke tellers of his small-town Virginia childhood, revealing insights in new encounters and old preoccupations. Soos writes about pain and despair, aging, his divorce, his fatherΓÇÖs passing, regret, the loss of home, and the fear of death. But in the process of confronting these dark topics, he is full of wonder. As he writes at the end of an account of almost drowning, ΓÇ£Bruised but whole, I was alive, alive, alive.ΓÇ¥