Fieldnotes, A Forensic

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD

Her painful legs refused to emerge. It was a question of a particular movement. A passage from analyses to terrifying hallucination. The pressure oozing out of her. Still nursing she held up the head. Her own singular sensation of pain. Ferociously archival proof of an event that left no other material.

Fieldnotes, a forensic charts one forensic anthropologist's series of descents in the first decade of the new millennium - a decade when forensic discourses and experts became ubiquitous in popular culture and on the daily news. But the edgy, passionate and erudite writer of these fieldnotes is no Temperance Brennan or Kathy Reichs. Part parody of popular discourses on the forensic anthropologist, part exegesis of the fieldnote genre, and part response to the natural and human catastrophes that unfolded during the writing of this book, Eichhorn's second collection continues to explore the poetics and affective dimensions of knowledge making at the edges of poetry and fiction.