What Began Us
by Melissa Buzzeo (2007)

In this groundbreaking first book, the desire "To reabsorb. To make to reabsorb" calls for text to be like skin. Through radical disorganization of the order of things--where "the salt is unreadable," where "you try to slip the smudge to sing to the smudge," where the thing we normally enter turns our to be the surface we're standing on--Melissa Buzzeo attempts a new moment of writing. The before, the between, the un-times. What Began Us is a story of portraiture, a philosophy of the book, and, most powerfully, a "marked retrieval" of a fifteen-year-old girl from the ruins of an unnamed (unnameable) event. This unsettling work builds out of the debris of fractionated memory and broken gestures towards an illuminated structure, a thought project well worth the time it'll take to know it.

Praise for What Began Us:

“Melissa Buzzeo crafts her sentences as a minimalist unit of perception. It can move with a prepositional sinuousness, or in concise frames, as in a film. It lends itself to what she compellingly calls 'the pleasure of cataloguing confusion.' It recurs also, to suggest the wave structure of sleep, thinking, love. And in each sentence she shows how the senses crystallize to form concepts of time. This a precociously patient book: it waits for its reader. This can feel wise, or erotic, as if it were we who she ably pronounces.”
—Lisa Robertson

“What Began Us is an agitated, activated lyric that incants to a changing, pulsating beloved. What or who this beloved is goes beautifully unnamed. This is a new take on that very old form of the lyric. In its newness it is something shimmering and fully complicated.”
—Juliana Spahr