A Summoning by Nicole McCarthy

“The book is a mélange of possibility; it is a fixation of multiple realities. [Nicole McCarthy] grasps trauma, grasps the structural damage of Alzheimer’s, she brings to bear what can be cherished and finds niche intersections with what is necessary.”

—North of Oxford

“Through accumulating and even overlapping and obscured fragments of image, scraps and lyric prose, McCarthy explores how experience changes both the body and memory itself.”

—rob mclennan

“McCarthy does an incredible job blending the informational with the emotional and creates a strong foundation for affective or sentimental attachment to the rest of her story.”

—DIAGRAM

“Tolstoy famously began his great novel of marital misery like this: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Nicole McCarthy’s electrifying book—a hybrid of poem, essay, photo, document, lyric and elegy—shows that every modern divorce is painful in its own way. Anna Karenina struggles against the social constraints of pre-feminist culture of l9th century Russia, but the woman in A Summoning faces the more insidious enemy of American cultural schizophrenia: sexual repression vs sex positive sloganeering; hedonism vs puritanism; militarism vs slacker culture. The clash of the desire for home and the desire for freedom, whatever those mean … McCarthy’s book is fearless, brave and a godsend to readers.”

—Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body (winner of a LAMBDA Literary award) and Not Heaven, Somewhere Else

“Nicole McCarthy’s A Summoning is an elegant, unflinching treatise on the subject of memory, engaging everything from the celestially studded mythos of ancient Greece to newfound conclusions of cellular biology to coax forth the intricacies of reminiscence. The searing prose and arresting visuals of the hybrid form are nothing short of orchestral in McCarthy’s hands. Blueprints reveal the architecture of toxic domesticity. Textual repetition and erasure lay bare the devastating unreliability with which we bear witness and lay claim to one another. A Summoning truly soars, however, when McCarthy grants the reader vulnerable access to an airless and seemingly inescapable love affair. When trauma infiltrates the house of memory, A Summoning suggests, sometimes the only thing to do is burn it down. As she escapes these smoking rooms, McCarthy offers by example this amazing grace: that holy reclamation of the self is possible. That if in our darkest hours we find a way to persist, we will remain.”

—Piper J. Daniels, author of Ladies Lazarus, finalist for a LAMBDA Literary award and a PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award

“In her gorgeous debut, Nicole McCarthy takes us through the rooms of a life, warning that there are rooms we won’t wish to revisit, places that we will flee, destroy, set aflame. Memory, she instructs, is not so much a palace as it is a haunted attic, a storage shed of despair, places we return to against our wishes, a drink we are forced to take. ‘Would you alter a memory, if you could?’ she asks. In a fragile and ethereal layering of poetic language, intense recollections, philosophical propositions, and visual splicing and collaging, McCarthy alters our understanding of the method of loci and thereby the notion that memory is a palace. She has set it down here, permanently, and for all time, in this book, so as to remind us that no matter how crumbling, how collapsed our lives, we can only hope to escape our frantic pacing, our retracings through memory.”

—Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between, The Body, and others

“The way architects understand that structures act on us as much as we act on them, Nicole McCarthy has written and designed a living book that functions like a building containing separate but overlapping rooms of body, memory, and space. Each room, no matter how complex, is accessible from anywhere in this building, and that’s why A Summoning is alive and gracious, because I feel like it cares about how we move through and inhabit its spaces. We can participate like hell in this book and it’s a beautiful thing to have that type of intellectual and emotional agency.”

—Steven Dunn, author of water & power and Potted Meat

“Asking, ‘can I give up this body when I have filled it with too many memories?’ McCarthy shows us where they truly reside—under shoulder blade and rib, in the taut muscles of calves still ready to sprint away from what taunts and haunts them. Kneading the places where love, loss, and trauma reside, she risks recall to help us reckon with the power Mnemosyne holds over us.”

—Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book and Pomegranate Eater 

“Nicole McCarthy extends and perforates the essay form with this insistence: to reclaim what has been taken, to build back memories that have been gaslit, to re-introduce the body into architectures of living, you need all manners of writing and thought. You need blueprints and fragmentation; you need the white of the page, the line breaking, the flow of prose, the simultaneous silence and noise of erasure. The resulting shape is a series of built spaces made for healing and self-articulation. A Summoning is a vital work and an admirable debut.”

—Renee Gladman, author of Calamities and the Ravicka Series

PRESS
– Architectures of Memory – EcoTheo Collective
– Nicole McCarthy: On Summoning Craft and Taking Risks – Write or Die
– MFA Alum Nicole McCarthy (MFA ’17) Interviewed in CRAFT – February 2023 – IAS News – UW Bothell
– Interview: Nicole McCarthy – CRAFT
– Rob McLennan interviews Nicole McCarthy (MFA 2017) about writing and A Summoning – January 2023 – IAS News – UW Bothell
– A Summoning by Nicole McCarthy | North of Oxford
– Six Ridiculous Questions: Nicole McCarthy – Vol. 1 Brooklyn
– rob mclennan’s blog: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nicole McCarthy
– rob mclennan’s blog: Nicole McCarthy, A SUMMONING: MEMORY EXPERIMENTS
– Nicole McCarthy publishes creative essay “Touch” – April 2022 – IAS News – UW Bothell
– DIAGRAM :: Jesi Buell on Nicole McCarthy
– MFA Alum Nicole McCarthy publishes her first book, A Summoning – August 2022 – IAS News – UW Bothell