Lost Wax

Jericho Parms takes the title of this essay collection from the lost-wax method sculptors use to cast bronze. The eighteen pieces circle around art and memory, testing how form and content shape meaning and how language handles innocence, experience, and grief. The book is divided into four sections, each named for a sculpture by Degas, Bernini, or Rodin, and each holds a run of reflections on where the visible world ends and on the outer limits of the body and the self. Parms often turns to her childhood in the Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s, and to travels through Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and the American West. She also works through race, love, family, madness, and nostalgia, along with the lasting pull of art, poetry, and music. Much of the writing was done inside the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The essays ask how people arrange memory and experience even though observation and language can only reach so far. Parms keeps returning to a central question: how do you describe the surface of marble or bronze, and how do you live with the tangled facts of identity, stillness and motion, life and death, and what it means to be young and alive.