Lost Wax: Essays (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

For her collection Lost Wax Jericho Parms borrows her title from a casting method used by sculptors. As such these eighteen essays centered on art and memory o er an investigation into form and content and the language of innocence experience and loss. Four sections (each borrowing names from the sculptures of Degas Bernini and Rodin) frame a series of meditations that consider the boundaries of the discernible world and the extremes of the body and the self. Here Parms draws heavily on memories of a Bronx upbringing in the 1980s and 1990s; explorations in Spain Portugal Ireland and the American West; the struggle to comprehend race love family madness and nostalgia; and the unending influence of art poetry and music. . Written largely within the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Lost Waxis an inquiry into the ways we curate memory and human experience despite the limits of observation and language. In these essays Parms exhibits and examines her greatest obsessions: how to describe the surface of marble or bronze; how to embrace the necessary complexities of identity stillness and movement life and death―how to be young and alive.