Davis, PhD, author of Stillbirth, Yet Still Born and When Courage Lies in Letting Go And if you’ve made life-and-death medical decisions for your own newborn, you’ll find comfort in knowing you’re not alone in your search for answers and meaning. Whether you’re primarily a writer or a thinker, her words will inspire you to excel at both. Examining the intersection of life and death through many lenses, she considers ideas from the fields of literature and philosophy to physics and medical ethics, and she ponders deeply. With thoughtful and thought-provoking prose, Claudia Putnam tries to make sense of the senseless-the death of her newborn son, Jacob. Todd Hearon, author of Strange Land and Crows in Eden ' Following Emerson and the probings of her heart, Claudia Putnam has spun a dazzlingly dark threnody into the labyrinth of love and grief, a journey deeply personal and, ultimately, for us all. “ Double Negative ushers us into the heart-wrenching grammar of loss, a warring opposition of “worsts” wherein the only positive is possibility: a condition of suspended (non)being which ' isn’t anyplace, and never was not. Pamela Erens, author of Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life Double Negative broke my heart and educated me.
As a parent called upon to make an unthinkable decision, she is a feeling and wise guide. “Claudia Putnam gives us the language to ask ourselves what we truly believe about the soul, suffering, and the value of life. Mairead Small Staid, author of The Traces In Double Negative, she offers a searching exploration of choices unmade, of lives unlived, of the unknowable and yet intimate space of what she names ' the beforehere, the beforewhen. Out of inexpressible pain, Claudia Putnam has found expression, in the word's ancient meaning: a squeezing forth, a source of nourishment. “ Double Negative is a moving, thought-provoking essay on the long aftermath of loss. James Marcus, former editor of Harper's Magazine and author of Amazonia Double Negative is a memorial, and a beautiful one, to a child who, as the author puts it, 'never was not.' ” But what grips the reader most is the abbreviated life story of Jake Putnam-the rapid entrance and exit of a human soul. She supplies us with context, both historical (the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s beloved son in 1842) and scientific (current research into DMT, the so-called 'spirit molecule' manufactured in our brains).
Claudia Putnam writes about that supreme calamity, the loss of a child, with tremendous, almost frightening candor. “I was not prepared for this lovely, strange, sad, and deeply moving book. Jenny Boully, 2021 Split/Lip Press Nonfiction/Hybrid Contest judge Essaying at its best, this is a book that grabs you immediately while examining the difficult and impossible task of letting go.” Employing existentialism, the philosophy of space and time, theoretical astrophysics, the philosophy of mathematics, literature, studies of death, psychology, dreams, found material, and personal experience, the author leads us deep inside the mortal coil and its intersections of time and love and loss. “In exquisite prose that sparkles and pulses, Double Negative employs the long-essay form in an attempt to make manifest the nature of grief. She asks whether there might be a difference between not dying and living, exploring personhood, and wondering at how the living do, somehow, manage to orbit so close to the event horizon of a child’s death.
When is the right time to die, especially if someone is just beginning life? Three decades after her decision regarding Jacob’s fate, Claudia Putnam employs poetry, physics, calculus, scientific research into a hallucinogen, and the structure of the English language to interrogate her experience with grief. The impossibility in Double Negative is the death of an infant, the author’s son Jacob, from an immutable heart defect that medicine, nonetheless, asserts there are options to treat. Winner of the 2021 Nonfiction/Hybrid Chapbook Contestĭouble Negative examines the grammatical logic that two negatives make a positive, that an impossibility can ever be resolved by word rearrangement or by rearrangements of the physical body.
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