Restoring the Burnt Child is the second volume in William Kloefkorn’s four-part memoir, which will cover the four elements: water, fire, earth, and air. Negotiating the no man’s land between ages nine and thirteen, this memoir of a small-town boy’s life in 1940s Kansas continues the story Kloefkorn began in his much-loved volume This Death by Drowning . With characteristic humor and in prose as lyrical as his poetry, he describes the unsentimental education he received at the hands of the denizens of Urie’s Barber Shop and the Rexall Drugstore and at the knees of the true characters who made up his family. From the “firefly” stunt that nearly burns down his home to the distant firestorms of World War II, fire presents an endless range of subtle and surprising lessons for the boy, whose impressions Kloefkorn conveys with the immediacy, naiveté, and poignancy of youth—and reconsiders with the wisdom and distance of age.
Restoring the Burnt Child powerfully brings to life the lost, unforgettable world of a boy, and of a poet, coming of age in midcentury middle America. Chosen as a 2008 One Book, One Nebraska selection, this Bison Books edition is updated with a set of discussion questions.
