Summary

The novel opens with a prologue titled “New Country” (1). Page 3 is titled, “The Photograph” and the novel begins in first person perspective (3). The page is 11 lines long, with no capitalization and the only punctuation is "&" instead of the word “and.” The main voice describes their parents before they had them, dancing and smiling at each other, their father’s “sepia hand longing” for her mother’s waist as they are “frozen [line break] immortal in the photograph” (3). The next page is titled “Baba,” as the narrator describes pictures of their father everywhere in her house, explaining these were taken before the car crash “that took him from knowing me” (4). This page does not list the lines consecutively but are more spaced out, sometimes two at a time, but mostly just single lines. Page 5 is titled “Mama,” in various numbered stanzas as the narrator...