Exploring the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire, this work of creative nonfiction-a Bakeless Prize winner-re-creates the achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spent together on the shores of the remote St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay. In the span of a lifetime, their encounters were relatively brief, but loaded with meaning. Here, her heart-stopping erotic-yet wholly imagined-scenes, her imaginings of different outcomes, and her searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, read like a friend's deepest secrets, shared. "Full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson's words and memory.
