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In these experimental lyric essays, Lowrey explores queerness, PTSD, anxiety, and created family. A framing of Rally Obedience and Dog Agility course maps create a textured story on the page, a hybrid form in which Lowrey recounts a spiritual-like relationship to dogs beginning in childhood, a passion for dog shows fractured in adolescence with a period of homelessness, a service dog, anxiety, and a return to dog sports. This collection transcends Lowrey’s personal relationship with dogs to tell a larger story about healing, loss, trauma, survival, and of course the love (and salvation) of many good dogs.
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Because of COVID-19 I am not able to currently sell signed copies of this book. It is available on Amazon and from independent retailers.
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Advanced Praise for Healing/Heeling
“Healing/Heeling is a poetic fever-dream of a small book about training, handling and living with dogs: how they make us and save us and can even almost break us. Sassafras Lowrey’s book is an essay, a harsh poem, an autobiography, a fractured narrative—and an apology and ode to the dogs of hir life: the spooky, the injured, the vulnerable, the brave. But the book’s heartbreak is beautifully balanced by its close companion: the transcendent joy that comes from working in close partnership with a dog. Serpentine and leap, heel and heal.”
Cat Warren, NYT bestselling author of What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World.
“Merging the mechanics of dog handling courses with the intensely personal story of how relationships with dogs have shaped hir life, Sassafras Lowrey has created a new kind of memoir, both deeply engaging and emotionally devastating. Combining poetry and prose, ze explores the themes of queerness, family, and the deep bond between humans and dogs with raw honesty and grace.”
Michael Thomas Ford, 5-time Lambda Literary Award Winner
“Using narrative mixed with the visuals of dog agility course maps, Sassafras guides us through a journey of obstacles, sudden turns, long tunnels, leaps of bravery, and now, eventually, so many “clean runs.” So often, after inordinate trauma, it is necessary to not only leave what damaged us behind but also everything associated with it. Sassafras Lowrey shows us that it is possible to not only re-invent ourselves, but also to gather up and claim the lost pieces of what has always sustained us.
—Sandra Gail Lambert, author of A Certain Loneliness
“This small book has a big impact if you love dogs. It is a deep and dreamlike meditation on how hir love of dogs intertwined with and redeemed hir brutalized childhood and how dog sports like agility, obedience and scent work nurtured a damaged sense of self worth and agency.”
-Esther Newton, author of My Butch Career: A Memoir