“How does Language create us?” asks L.I. Henley and Jennifer K. Sweeney in Dear Question: A Conversation. Or perhaps one has asked the other, and the other replies, “If not answers, then song.” I love all this book grapples with—illness, infertility, solitude, political unrest, deep personal disappointment, the “communal wound—” and I love even more how it grapples—as a conversation between two best friends. The intimacy in witnessing this exchange is a revelation. Somewhere between “rebuilding a heart” and “the mind’s silk chord,” this book reminds me that if we allow language to create us—in all call & response, the asking & listening, the observation & naming—we might all become “a little bit saved.” 

 

Nicole Callihan, author of This Strange Garment