Place Where Buildings Go

Lush. Gorgeous. Sparingly full. These are just some of the words that describe Carrie Vrabel's novella, The Place Where Buildings Go, in which she reflects, "I want to get back behind the words and the stories and the cities to find the other parts of the world, to find if there is anything else, anything good. To find the place before a word, to see if there is also something kind or caring or selfless." It is this "place before a word" which Vrabel's lyrical prose conjures. This book explores the woods and moons and farm fields of small town Claypool, Indiana, where a lineage of women inhabit the land formerly farmed by the speaker's father until his passing. Surrounded by men who do not respect animal life and whose every word seeks to determine the destinies of women-the speaker and her relatives embrace a generative world in which the animals that populate their land permeate their consciousness with primordial understanding. In the process, Vrabel exposes the complexities women confront in a power-hungry world, demonstrating their strength and resilience in resisting systemic patriarchy. Vrabel's language compels the narrative forward with passages as richly poetic as: "Faster than the geese startle up off the lake, she is gone" and "bones are becoming coral and becoming lace. Wood and then cork. Age blew holes through them like the mountains in Utah-if her pulse were the wind." The Place Where Buildings Go is a gorgeous novella storying us inward to a core where a more generative and equitable world can be built.

-George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016)