A Brief Family History of Drowning

Winner of the 2018 Sonder Press Chapbook Competition, Bryce Emley's A Brief Family History of Drowning, is a haunting, delicate ode to family, gracefully charting the weathered wash of a shared past salted with the sting of loss and longing. From a father's stroke, to the death of a mother and a brother's incarceration, this collection of works, some essays, others less easily defined, chronicles the vast and enduring weight of grief, and the indelible tether of blood shared. Emley's prose is exquisite, precise and masterfully crafted. Water permeates these pages, language ebbs and flows, swells, engulfs. A Brief Family History of Drowning renders in brilliant relief the weighted voyage of a son searching for a path through the rising swells of the present and desperate undertow of the past.