Terroir: Love, Out of Place

by Natasha Sajé

Overview

The word “terroir” refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. Natasha Sajé applies this idea to the environments that nurture and challenge us, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. She revisits people and literature across her life, including her experiences as the child of European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing of a widowed neighbor; a winter spent waitressing in Switzerland; her marriage to a Jamaican man in Baltimore; and finally her marriage to a woman in Salt Lake City.

This memoir-in-essays combines poetic lyricism with incisive commentary on nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Reminding us that change is constant in our lives, Sajé asks how terroir creates identity. Throughout, the English language is her most fertile ground.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595349323
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Natasha Sajé is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, most recently Vivarium, and the postmodern poetry handbook Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory. She is a professor of English at Westminster College and a faculty member in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Editorial Reviews

09/14/2020

Poet Sajé (Vivarium) devotes these eight thoughtful essays to exploring how place develops identity, framing the subject using the French viticultural term for “the whole environment in which something... is grown.” Though she acknowledges how her Slovenian father and German mother and their respective cultures influenced her, Sajé muses that for immigrants like her, “terroir does more work than family to shape identity.” Across several essays, Sajé recounts her early marriage to a Black man from Jamaica and his eventual death from lymphoma, honoring her late spouse while also confronting her own white privilege: “I’m chagrined to admit that I thought I had proven my lack of racism by living with Tyrone.” In other essays, Sajé interrogates her feelings of otherness both in the U.S. and during trips to Europe, where even after extensive travels, Sajé concludes that “the traveler is only authorized to be ‘other,’ to observe and to participate in superficial layers of the foreign culture.” This book will fascinate readers interested in the interplay between identity and place. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Captivating reading... Natasha Sajé’s ranging essay collection explores the nature of the self while shedding light on race, sexuality, nationality, and the meaning of home." — Foreword Reviews

"Thoughtful essays...will fascinate readers interested in the interplay between identity and place." — Publishers Weekly

"Combines fascinating personal history with challenging arguments and ideas about identity, writing, race, nationality, sexuality, and more." — Book Riot

Terroir is about how the roots of a place can't entirely be separated from the time your life that you spent there, and the people with whom you spent that time." — Salt Lake City Weekly

“A complex and full-hearted book. As Sajé grapples with what it means to be a human living in community with other humans, she must also consider complicating questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, professional and familial loyalties, nationality, and economic class. This is not a book to suggest we are all human and therefore all the same, capable of loving and being loved. Rather, in these pages Sajé struggles with what makes us all different, and what it means when she stands by someone in the face of all that might set her and all others apart.” — Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers

“Such a gorgeous memoir-in-essays. One of the most beautiful and intimate self-portraits I’ve read in recent years. Sajé's mix of intellectual chops and emotional candor creates an unsparing account of one smart and compassionate person’s life. That this life becomes a conduit and critique of the last forty or so years of political and social upheaval is an added and bracing benefit for the reader. I can’t say, ‘I couldn’t put this book down.’ On the contrary, I put the book down quite often to further reflect upon rich worlds and observations it opened for me. ” — Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood

“Terroir is an important collection of personal essays on the theme of otherness, derived from a lifetime of uncommon experience, that offers new ways of thinking about what it means to be human. ‘Awareness of the increasingly pressing question of how to spend my time on earth makes every choice significant,’ Natasha Sajé writes. And her reflections on those choices are by turns revelatory, challenging, and deeply moving. Such wisdom she possesses!” — Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

“Natasha Sajé’s essays examine coming of age in America as a profoundly intersectional experience with her honest exploration of what it means to be an insider, an outsider, and a passionately alert artist. Her essays are conjured from an inexplicable combination of elements—a terroir—that’s at once sensual and intellectual, self-scouring and celebratory.” — Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers

From the Publisher