About the Book

Katherine McCord hilariously and poignantly captures living, as a writer/person/mother/professor/wife, that is, as anyone, overly aware and stunned by the time we are in, this often fascinating but very difficult age.

Praise for RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE: A Literary Memoir

“Although experiment with genre is nothing new, it is usually not as personal as RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE. McCord more than plays with the linear narrative, but rather ponders its purpose in relation to the topic at each turn. It is as if the reader is sitting at the writing desk with her, trying to focus but interrupted constantly by children, duties, fantasies, and memories.”
—Split This Rock

“McCord’s short entries string together, given a sense of propulsion precisely by her own breathless quest for honesty, confiding in the reader that she can’t quite find the thing she means to say and so she returns on each page with another angle, refracting and pursuing the quickening edge of life and consciousness itself.”
—Brevity

“To ‘READ’ (and yes I am using all that graphic punctuation with intent!) this extraordinary memoir, RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE, I had to employ a ZIP Extractor to extract (from the brain-like folds of the CLOUD) this gorgeously convoluted and original origamied textual text of the not so transparent text of this bookish book. That is to say, embedded in this message is the message that this mean medium is the message (a blast from the past!) and what a divine mess of a message it is.

Too often, it seems to me, we construct our books as if they are mere transcriptions of oral tales, desiring to invoke a waking dream in the reader while disguising the scaffolding of the narrative delivery device (the book itself), suppressing, consciously, the self-conscious consideration of self-consciousness. McCord, in RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE, reignites the curious rotary engine of curiosity, the spirographic folding back, that ululation, as a great storyteller confronting the unique high-techery of the book. Believe me, this book cannot, ever, be made into a movie or binge TV series or streamed video. No, it is a book’s BOOK. A map more detailed than the thing it represents. It confronts the BOOK and does what only the BOOK can do and does it with goddamn gumption and infinite grace.

Katherine McCord’s life here is an open book book, and the fine instrument of that opening is the story of that story.”
—Michael Martone

“Katherine McCord has changed the terms of engagement from labyrinth to chambered nautilus. She explores—with searing insight and humility and sensitive intelligence—the movement through terrible forms of solitude into the blessed difficulties of summoning her beloved ones, past and present, for a new dance. Madness and aloneness and despair and shame echo through RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE, but the whole effect is the unforgettable release of the human cry freed to roam the world.”
—Kevin McIlovy

Katherine McCord is the author of Island (poems, March Street), Living Room (prose poems, March Street), My CIA (lyric essay-memoir, TOSP), Run Scream Unbury Save (lyric essay-memoir, winner of the Autumn House Nonfiction Prize). She has had work published in American Poetry Review and two essays in Essay Daily. She has an MA in Creative Writing (NMSU) […]

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