SENECA REVIEW

I|I by Katherine Indermaur

In lieu of a fall 2022 issue, Seneca Review Books released Katherine Indermaur's I|I, winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.

Katherine Indermaur's full-length debut, I|I, is a serial lyric essay that explores the mirror's many dimensions—philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical—alongside the author's own experiences. Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one's own reflection. Indermaur's essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirmation to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song.

"In fragments one might be known. Seen from dozens of angles, the mind may move among facets and see the whole. It is, in fact, how seeing works in the human brain anyhow. Katherine Indermaur's I|I finds rich resonances among these disparate but not discrete shards. Rather a full shape in time and space assembles. Both the 'lyric' and the 'essay' are fully achieved, home is sought, the self seeks to connect with all of what is beyond." —Kazim Ali, book prize judge and renowned poet and essayist
I|I by Katherine Indermaur
You can order I|I from directly from us or from SPD, Bookshop, or Amazon.

Additional Praise

""Every seeing distorts the world," writes Katherine Indermaur in I|I. Culling historical and cultural fragments of what mirrors are as well as what they mean, Indermaur invites us to peer into longing and wonder. She pulls us in close to the reflection, asking us to look deeper into words and meaning, revealing a fragmented yet encompassing portrait of what it means to confront the self beyond the perceived "I." With an eye to both poetry and philosophy, I|I reveals the dangers of seeing, how light and reflection, once unveiled, gives way to a broken and distorted existence and perception of so many unending selves. It is a delight to gaze into these mirrory fragments, seemingly stretching into infinity."
— Jenny Boully, author of The Body and Betwixt-and-Between
"With its meditative capture of the ways of looking, Katherine Indermaur assembles an exquisite composite of personal memory, facial (and existential) examination, etymology, and cross-cultural ways of seeing oneself in I|I. This brilliant lyric flows like a resplendent river replete with tributaries and oxbow lakes, where each bend of water orients the eye to new lines of sight. This essay is visionary, it envisions, revising its modes of seeing to query the quotidian practice of seeing oneself in a reflective surface."
— Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost of
""If I could only see more clearly my own seeing." So begins Katherine Indermaur's stunning Facing the Mirror, a book that looks long, and longingly, at vision itself. In our ocularcentric world, both mirror and eye, not unlike language, are taken at face value. The eye/ I of these poem-essays glides over the surface while, at the same time, "unsurfac[ing] things," ushering the reader into a depth that challenges the reign of vision."
— Sasha Steensen, Everything Awake and Gatherest

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