"[Dine's] prose is a poet's prose, often beautiful . . . [the book] reads like a skier on a slalom course full of jigs, jags, and quick jumps that capture a good amount of the fine surprises and sudden disasters in her life."-Norman Mailer

"Each piece or collage represents a thread of memories that veil and unveil other memories of loss, abuse, and fragmentation. Places in the Bone is an extraordinary work of literature written with grace, eloquence, and dignity-an important testimony of endurance as well as hope."-Marjorie Agosin, author of Poems for Josefina and recipient of the United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights.

"I can't remember the last time I was so captured by a book's spell. Carol Dine brilliantly blends past and present events and emotions so that time becomes a collective experience, not a mere chronology. Although this beautiful memoir is full of sorrow, it is ultimately about the redemptive power of art and language."-Stephen McCauley, author of The Object of My Affection and True Enough

"In her office, the doctor holds up a Plexiglas drawing of inside a woman and runs a fingernail over the floating shapes I'm about to lose. . . . I remember my college history professor facing a map of Europe and pointing to France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, all taken by the Nazis. . ."-Excerpted from Places in the Bone

In a series of unflinching vignettes laced with heartbreak and often with humor, Places in the Bone gives an unforgettable account of loss and survival, childhood secrets banished from memory, and the power of language to retrieve the missing parts of oneself and one's past. Woven together with unmistakable lyricism, Carol Dine's narrative moves back and forth in time and place-from the childhood bedroom that fills her with fear, to a hospital room after her surgery for breast cancer, to an adobe hut in a New Mexico artists' colony where she escapes and finds her voice.

This voice, it turns out, is a chorus-a harmony of cries, both anguished and triumphant. Among them we hear a young girl speak about the abuse by her father; we hear the tormented reflections of a mother who, for several years after a divorce, loses contact with her young son; and we hear the testimony of a cancer survivor. Through it all, we feel the determination, courage, and creativity of a woman who has spent more than two decades confronting her past, her body, and her identity. Despite having struggled with a series of relationships, Dine finds positive influences in her life, including her mentor, Anne Sexton, who recognizes the fire in her words, and Stanley Kunitz, whose indomitable spirit provides enduring inspiration.

More than a story of personal loss, the memoir moves us with its humanity, its unnerving wit, and its defiant faith. As the fragments come together, we experience Dine's joy in living and her reconciliation with the past that allow her to renew bonds with her son, her sister, and her mother. In page after page, the memoir witnesses the power of art to refigure a body, to transform suffering, and ultimately, to redeem.

Read more at www.placesinthebone.com.

Carol Dine is the author of two books of poetry and is widely published in literary magazines, including The Bitter Oleander, Blue Mesa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander. She is a public speaker on surviving breast cancer and has been a poet in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She teaches at Suffolk University and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Text
The Tape in the Drawer
The Locked Box
Bad Girls
The Woman in My Poem
Treatments
Sisters
Reconstruction
The Mahogany Box
Talking to God
Exile
Dear Mother,
Places in the Bone
A Chain of Women
Lovers and Sons
In Remission
The Lighthouse