Guide to the Ruins by Eve Müller
advance praise for Eve Müller's book, Guide to the Ruins:
Guide to the Ruins tumbles into the splendor, chaos, and abundance of Rome. A portrait of a love affair with a city and the simultaneous near-dissolution of a marriage, the first section overflows with ruins, decay, beauty and desire. The speaker revels in bodies: crypts of bones, broken statues, men on motorbikes, fleshy bodies at the beach. The city loves her back, gazing in frank admiration as her own aging, ecstatic body walks its streets. Have I been unfaithful? asks one section of this beautiful extended prose poem. Yes, you have loved a city. The second half of this work returns us to life in Maryland, where the speaker must learn to find beauty in the familiar and come to terms with the relationships she has. The chapbook begins and ends by considering the possibility of making something new without wholly replacing the old. As they do in Rome. As a marriage might. As we all must, if we are to grow and transform. This book maps that glorious journey. - Kelly Terwilliger, Riddle Fishhook Thorn Key
Guide to the Ruins asks of its reader: Is loneliness within a marriage the product of aging? Its inevitable conclusion? Or do we insist that a declaration of self is made there, regardless of how we might suffer? The beauty of this fragmentary, searing book lies in its ability to remain bound to its own complexity, to avoid the conclusive, and to embody everything, layer upon layer. If you believe, as I do, that the task of the writer is to unleash the irreconcilable onto the world through the most direct and unflinching language possible, then this book will keep you enrapt. – Michael McGriff, Eternal Sentences
Eve Müller’s marvelous Guide to the Ruins is a love story, not of the honeymoon stage of love, but rather what Alain Badiou would call the more profound, mature stage of constructing love in the long run, or rather trying, but not very successfully, to do so. The story takes us to Rome, on a quest to save the author-narrator’s marriage. The use of the second person to narrate this short, autobiographical novella plants the reader firmly, and thus precariously, in Müller’s shoes as she juggles her daily chores of caring for two vibrant daughters, attending Italian classes, taking in Rome’s glorious art and architecture— ruins, cathedrals, Bernini’s ecstatic saints, Caravaggio’s red-lipped boys— and wandering alone through the Roman streets where Italian men occasionally remind her of the persistence of her allure. This allure falls flat for her distant husband who also fails to see the romance of Rome: He’s been around the world half a dozen times. For him, Rome is just more of the same. But Müller’s spirit is untarnished and so are we, thanks to the book’s short, free-standing stanzas that read like the author’s journal entries—and Müller’s gift for narration which carries the reader swiftly along, full of longing, hope and melancholic lust for life that is everywhere present in this gem of a book. – Tim Shaner, Picture X