Movements & Periods, Literature 

Literary Nonfiction. In these hybrid writings—a mixture of memoir, prose poetry, personal essay, travel journal, and spiritual meditation—Stephen Kessler synthesizes a lifetime of experiences in language of extraordinary concentration, vividness, and lyricism. The stories he tells and the visions he evokes of places and people he has known could be anyone's, but they are the distillation of a singular personal history in a voice uniquely his own. "Stephen Kessler's WHERE WAS I? consists of brief meditations, musings, and reminiscences on place, presence, and the passing of time. They are astonishing reflections on how the past resurfaces in the present, lending a new dimension for which we have no name, where the here and now is framed by what was, where memory is transposed by imagination, and where experience through the spell of art is alchemized into eternal moments. In page after page of this amazing book, Kessler celebrates and mourns our mortal world. These pieces re-vision a lifetime of luminous and fugitive experiences; they are a thanksgiving and praise to a life well-lived coupled with an artistic intelligence that appreciates and celebrates its wonders."—Joseph Stroud - from Amzon