Body Toxic (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Susanne Antonetta
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Memoirs
- Time of Work: 1900-2000
- Setting: Elizabeth and the Pine Barrens of eastern New Jersey; northwest Washington State
- Principal Characters: Susanna Antonetta, Louis Cassill, May Cassill, Mary Cassill Antonetta, Nichola Antonetta, Bruce, Jin Woo Antonetta
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir
- Subjects: 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, 1940’s, Alienation, Poetry or poets, 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s, 1980’s, West, U.S., Mental illness, Substance abuse, New Jersey, Infertility, Human behavior, Pacific Northwest, 1990’s, Genetics, Environment or environmental health, Pollution, 1900’s, Mutations or mutants, Washington
- Locales: New Jersey, Washington
In Susanne Antonetta’s self-proclaimed “environmental memoir” Body Toxic, the author, an award-winning poet, replaces the neatly chronological, narrative self-presentation conventionally found in memoir with a more experimental project, one that rejects linear exposition as it reformulates and extends a number of contemporary autobiographical paradigms. The foundational landscape in this geography of the self, if not the one most obviously telegraphed in the title, is that of the American family, complete with its own complex roots, vistas, and swamps. Antonetta’s...
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