Description: "In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother's life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief."--
Brief description: Justin Gardiner is the author of Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, as well as the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers and assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University, and he serves as the nonfiction editor of The Southern Humanities Review.
Review Quotes: "At its tender heart, Justin Gardiner's Small Altars considers death, yes, but the life of fraternal bonds, illness, and separation--all placed on the psychic altars kept for loved ones. The figure of the superhero, the notion of the Endgame itself echoes throughout this haunted essay. Told in illustrative fragments and movements (like Debussy's Claire de Lune), Small Altars elevates sound and reverberation from
block-written-as-panel to panel. Mixing chronology, research into mental illness and cancer, this essay's blood circulatory system mirrors grief through its multivalent recurrences. In unassailable prose that only could be written by a poet, this tender reflection carves out space for two brothers that will endure well beyond these pages."-- "Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria"