Lisa Jacobson's The Sunlit Zone

It was a mildly warm morning. I made my way hurriedly through the campus – today we had a guest speaker, and I had devoured her brilliant book of prose with my mind days before this day. I needed to meet her, I needed to have her acknowledge that I was utterly immersed in her brilliant work.

I made it – five minutes earlier. She was around ten minutes late when class had begun. And so I sat there, taking notes on the last page of her book with my pacer. I wrote about her interpretations of the themes in the prose, and I related them to my own just to study her psyche. I noted that she had rewritten the novel twenty to thirty times. I noted things that inspired it, who took the cover photograph, everything she had said I had documented as a way of showing interest and respect to her.

Then, question time. A couple of other people had asked her mindless questions, some about symbolism. And then it was my turn. I cannot recall my first question, however I can recall my second quite well, seeing as I asked it in urgency due to our lecturer beckoning us to show some more interest in her work.

The question I asked had thrown her off track – she has had none other like it, for people only focus on the contaminants of the book itself, rather than its actual build. Today, I was to challenge her with a question lacking complexity – “the two navy pages at the beginning and the end of the book, does the placement of them symbolise that the story itself it in a sunlit zone, a pun of the title and story of the book?” And she froze, her look of confusion frozen with her.

She basically had answered that she had no idea what the publishers had to do, that publishing her book in this sense was out of her control, and that the possible symbolism of this was most likely untrue, but possibly could have been possible. Disheartened, I sunk into my seat and wished I had never asked.

If I were a published author or poet, I would want utter control of what I publish. The cover, the cover photo, the way the book is arranged, everything. I believe symbolism is not contained only in the story, but also in the make of the book itself.

I recommend The Sunlit Zone to all lovers of literature and poetry, because this very book has both of those elements perfectly intertwined.