Thin Places: Essays from in Between

Heaven and earth are three feet apart, according to a Celtic proverb. But in some areas so-called thin places, that boundary becomes even smaller. Jordan Kisner's bold debut collection maps these liminal zones, both real and imagined. Her essays survey the American sublime, examining our thirst for meaning and its tendency to manifest in unexpected places: the border, the body, the West, débutante balls, medical examiners monitoring the frontier between life and death, young evangelical Christians proselytizing in nightclubs and on Instagram, Mormon women politely trying to overthrow the government. In Thin Places, Kisner deciphers and dissolves the binaries that mark contemporary life: us and them, religious and secular, rural and urban, queer and straight, individual and collective, empirical and magical. The result is a searching, incisive, and often funny quest through the fun house of American culture.