Dear Question: A Conversation

“How does language create us?” ask L.I. Henley and Jennifer K. Sweeney in Dear Question: A Conversation. Or perhaps one has asked the other, and the other replies, “If not answers, then song.” I love all this book grapples with-illness, infertility, solitude, political unrest, deep personal disappointment, the “communal wound-,” and I love even more how it grapples-as a conversation between two best friends. The intimacy in witnessing this exchange is a revelation. Somewhere between “rebuilding a heart” and “the mind’s silk chord,” this book reminds me that if we allow language to create us-in the call & response, the asking & listening, the observation & naming-we might all become “a little bit saved.”

-Nicole Callihan,author of This Strange Garment