Randon Billings Noble

Randon Billings Noble has collected a range of lyric essays in a variety of forms that showcase the essay’s openness to experimentation, reliance on authentic voice, and potential to explore complex subject matter.

An Anthology of Lyric Essays

A Harp in the Stars

""Be with Me Always" is a collection ot essays that explore hauntedness, not through conventional ghost stories but by considering the way our pasts cling to our imaginations. Noble considers ways she has been haunted--by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, Anne Boleyn's violent death" --

Essays

Be with Me Always

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted—he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted—by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn’s violent death, a book she can’t stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts—in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

"Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!" Thus does Heathcliff beg his dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights. He wants to be haunted--he insists on it. Randon Billings Noble does too. Instead of exorcising the ghosts of her past, she hopes for their cold hands to knock at the window and to linger. Be with Me Always is a collection of essays that explore hauntedness by considering how the ghosts of our pasts cling to us. In a way, all good essays are about the things that haunt us until we have somehow embraced or understood them. Here, Noble considers the ways she has been haunted--by a near-death experience, the gaze of a nude model, thoughts of widowhood, Anne Boleyn's violent death, a book she can't stop reading, a past lover who shadows her thoughts--in essays both pleasant and bitter, traditional and lyrical, and persistently evocative and unforgettable.

What is a lyric essay? An essay that has a lyrical style? An essay that plays with form in a way that resembles poetry more than prose? Both of these? Or something else entirely? The works in this anthology show lyric essays rely more on intuition than exposition, use image more than narration, and question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has responsibilities—to try to reveal something, to play with ideas, or to show a shift in thinking, however subtle. The whole of a lyric essay adds up to more than the sum of its parts. In A Harp in the Stars, Randon Billings Noble has collected lyric essays written in four different forms—flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab—from a range of diverse writers. The collection also includes a section of craft essays—lyric essays about lyric essays. And because lyric essays can be so difficult to pin down, each contributor has supplemented their work with a short meditation on this boundary-breaking form.

Randon Billings Noble

About

Books

Join the club