Lauren Michele Jackson, "Back"

Back is a dazzling collection about backs, and the competing ideas we load upon them. Burdened with conflicting truths about human identity, the back bolsters cultural notions of beauty, gender, art, labor, and race. Across seven wide-ranging essays, Jackson explores the mythos of the back with prose that shifts easily between the conversational and the erudite, drawing on eclectic examples from literature, film, sport, and visual art. Moving through subjects as varied as bodybuilding, Gone With the Wind, horse racing, ballet, portrait photography, copyright law, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson probes the back at its most literal, the region of the body without which little can be done, and at its most symbolic, used to convey abstract ideas about work, dependence, and political solidarity. Here the back emerges as a site of vulnerability and desire, embodiment and rhetoric, dependence and resistance. In Jackson's hands, the back becomes a beginning, a broad door thrown open onto the body as both structure and metaphor, linking artistic and political representation through a shared attention to what, and who, is made to bear weight.