Deep Salt Water is an intimate memoir about abortion, expressed through a layering of language and imagery of the ocean. The story gravitates around the reconnection and ongoing entanglements of a couple who'd had an abortion twenty years earlier. Interdisciplinary in nature and entre-genre in style, Deep Salt Water is organized as thirty-seven separate pieces, divided into three sections (or 'trimesters') that detail the couple's love affair and unwanted pregnancy; the abortion itself; their separation and tenuous reconnection; and the sorrowful, urgent attempt to come to terms with the abortion and its consequences. Included in its pages are two innovative elements-a series of collages by visual artist Catherine Mellinger and a section entitled the 'Afterbirth,' which discusses environmental issues that informed Apostolides' writing and moves the book from a place of intense intimacy to an outward focus that engages with the broader world and our shared responsibility and hope.--$cProvided by publisher.
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Date published
- 2017.
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- C818/.6
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781771662789 9781771662802
- LCCN
- PR9199.4.A66
- LCCN Item number
- D44 2017eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (169 pages)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)kck00237533 (OCoLC)965746953 (CaOOCEL)452717
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- First Trimester 8
- #1. Blythe was a fish in my body 11
- #2. “Mama?” 13
- #3. We danced beneath palm trees whose fronds are pink and blue 18
- #4. If I were a fish, I’d be a salmon 21
- #5. “Mama, where does the ocean come from?” 23
- #6. My personal was political 27
- #7. My nephew was drowned as a Navy SEAL but now he’s beside me, face down in the water 28
- #8. We were ‘young and in love,’ a cliché that’s true 32
- #9. He rarely calls me by my name 34
- #10. Seagrass spreads in the Mediterranean, beds of fronds and roots like ginger 36
- #11. There’s no illumination here 39
- #12. If we heated one cubic foot of the ocean, we’d have two pounds of pure salt 41
- #13. The ocean releases its breath like a gift 46
- Second Trimester 48
- #14. My blood contains one drop of molten, gold from when the earth was formed 51
- #15. Maybe we shouldn’t have been so gleeful, but we couldn’t help it: we ate avocados that afternoon 55
- #16. The decision was mutual 60
- #17. He’d held my hand in the waiting room 65
- #18. They hovered in white gowns and white sheets, a wonderland of ghostly fluorescence 67
- #19. Tectonic plates glide over skeletal remains 73
- #20. If he was there, I don’t recall 76
- #21. Maybe he lived in a mangrove forest 79
- #22. The glorious union of death and fuck was never so obvious as in a salmon 82
- #23. Saturday night and the internet calls 85
- #24. You sent me an email; the wave knocked me down 88
- #25. Taste comes from the core of earth 91
- #26. I saw you at your wedding 95
- Third Trimester 102
- #27. I crawl in the shell of a horseshoe crab 105
- #28. Soon we’ll all be hoarding the ocean; we’ll store it in cars so that we can wash them 109
- #29. A whale dove down, through shallow waters 114
- #30. ‘Climatic stimuli’ include the tongue 119
- #31. Life doesn’t disappear, although that’s what ‘abortion’ means 122
- #32. Carbon dioxide is breaking the bond of word and meaning 124
- #33. All this time, I had it wrong 127
- #34. If I look at your heart, I can see it’s not red 129
- #35. I’m alone with the book; it’s over, again 131
- #36. The only evidence of their existence: a little volcano they leave as they dive 134
- #37. All that remains when we die is a poem 139
- Afterbirth 140
- Further Reading 151
- Works Cited 165
- Acknowledgements 170
