Staff Pick
In these essays, Blanchfield covers a wide range of subjects, from housesitting to footwashing. We follow his thought process and memories through surprising convergences and connections, ending up learning about the world and ourselves in the process. I've rarely been as excited by a collection of essays as I was while reading this book! Recommended By Adam P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A go-for-broke essay collection that blends cultural close reading and dicey autobiography.
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina.
In Proxies an original constraint, a "total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources," engineers Brian Blanchfield’s disarming mode of independent intellection. The "repeatable experiment" to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project’s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, "What do I know?"
Review
"Proxies: Essays Near Knowing brings a slowed-to-meaning lens to the remembered moments of a life. Blanchfield’s readers wander into his ordinary-extraordinary quotidian—the vulnerable longing of a singular voice expressing a peopled intelligence. Not since Hilton Als’s White Girls have I read anything as interrogative, unsettling, and brilliant." Claudia Rankine
Review
"Like M.F.K. Fisher, Blanchfield often begins by standing us at a safe speculative distance, allowing us to consider the complexity of human endeavor without immersing us in its messy physicality, so that when he finally does plunge us into the intimate details of his own autobiography — with excruciating honesty — we are left defenseless. Armed with mind only, our hearts and guts are left vulnerable, and the narrative tears them open…[The technique] seems to arise out of a deep humility in the face of complex emotion, a diffidence that relies on the intellect to prepare both writer and reader for the soul- and body-baring disclosures to follow….This is humility as seduction: you can’t help but trust him and lower your guard. Then you lean forward, listen closely, and follow wherever he leads." Scott Nadelson, Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"The quiet but searing vulnerability in Brian Blanchfield's writing is as wide and trembling as the wingspan of his otherness. He writes with a beguiling sagaciousness that made me bow my head so many times that I lost count. These are essays about honesty and the revelation of self in which shame and guilt are dissected and anything extraneous scrubbed away. Each sentence is a live wire. Diverse, maybe mismatched styles, genres and topics accrue to great and moving effect, a profound whole made from an unlikely assemblage of parts. He appears to be forging a new genre before your very eyes." Whiting Award Citation
Review
"Brian Blanchfield’s brief, multivalent essays are titled to echo the master of the form, Montaigne. They include 'On Withdrawal,' 'On Tumbleweed' and 'On House Sitting.'…Mr. Blanchfield’s more high-flown reflections [are] slyly used in juxtaposition with the plain-spoken memories of this 'working class white boy' from North Carolina….He calls the essays 'inroads to disinhibited autobiography.' One becomes acclimated to, and impressed by, the way he transitions from, say, an etymological investigation of billiards terminology to the way his father shot pool." John Williams, The New York Times
About the Author
Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award. His book of essays, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, was published in April 2016. Recent essays and poems have appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Guernica, The Nation, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, A Public Space, The Paris Review, and The Awl. He has taught as core faculty in the graduate writing programs of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he was the 2008 Richard Hugo Visiting Poet. Since 2010 he has been a poetry editor of Fence. A 2016 Whiting Award winner, he lives with his partner John in Tucson, where is the host of Speedway and Swan on KXCI 91.3.