The Blue of Her Body

Fiction. Gay & Lesbian Studies. Winner of the third annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, as selected by Final Judge Brian Evenson. When her lover, Kate, leaves her, the protagonist of THE BLUE OF HER BODY falls into a depression she begins to treat chemically. At the same time, she decides to further develop an interest she's always had by learning how to handle birds of prey--hawk, kestrel, owl, and eagle. Beauty, wildness, and danger are intertwined for a woman whose desire isnonetheless identifiably human: "All my life I have wanted my hands on a living thing." Ultimately, building powerful and poetic scene upon scene, the novel creates a memorable portrait of the human heart and its untamable nature, and the wonders of the act of human imagination we call love. "In elliptical and lyrical fragments, Greenslit brings very real daily struggles into the domain of art, rendering them resonant and making them, somehow, all the more real. A powerful first novel"--Brian Evenson.