Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Revolution for Covid

      January 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: My Precious: On Leaving My Abusive Ex-Husband and Being Left with the Ring

      January 13, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Saw-Whet

      January 7, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Review

      Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

      January 7, 2021

      Review

      Review: Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante

      December 21, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Salt and Sleep

      January 15, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Revolution for Covid

      January 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: My Precious: On Leaving My Abusive Ex-Husband and Being Left with the Ring

      January 13, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Saw-Whet

      January 7, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: A Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

      January 2, 2020

      Introspection

      Returning Home with Ross McElwee

      December 13, 2019

      Introspection

      The Birds: In Our Piety

      November 14, 2019

      Introspection

      Variations: Landslide

      June 12, 2019

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      The Birds: Little Birds

      December 11, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Perdix and a Pear Tree

      December 9, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Glimmer of Blue

      November 23, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: Circling for Home

      November 13, 2020

      Fiction

      The Birds: The Guest

      November 9, 2020

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Perceived Realities: A Review of M-Theory by Tiffany Cates

      January 14, 2021

      Review

      Review: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

      January 11, 2021

      Review

      Review – : once teeth bones coral : by Kimberly Alidio

      January 7, 2021

      Review

      Review: Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante

      December 21, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

      Small Press

      death of workers whilst building skyscrapers

      November 10, 2020

      Small Press

      Slate Roof Press

      September 15, 2020

      Small Press

      Ellipsis Press

      September 1, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Games

        Hunt A Killer, Earthbreak, and Empty Faces: Escapism for the Post-Truth Era

        September 21, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

        Video Games

        Best of 2018: Video Games

        December 17, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Review

Review: Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado

written by Brigitte Lewis May 16, 2019

Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado
Autumn House Press, March 2019
168 pages / Amazon

 

 

Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado contains fourteen essays that, no matter where they take place—Arizona, Oregon, Prague, Mexico—are deeply rooted in a distinct sense of surroundings and the people dearest to the author. Many of the essays reside at junctures of living and dying. Many of the essays show the body and the land shape shifting into situations sometimes downright hostile to survival. Many are akin to coming-of-age stories in that they are coming-to-different-ages stories, and describe what it is like to both experience and witness others growing up, growing older, and taking care of those we call family.

An ode to familial love, Anxious Attachments documents relationships with care and vulnerability and with a constant apprehension of what is at stake: when you love, you have something to lose. At one point the author writes,

The neighborhood was called Flowing Wells, but we came to call it Seeping Sewers because, when the wind shifted, we could smell the fumes from the ponds at the sewage treatment plant. In the middle of the night, we could hear the trains and, maybe because we had small children, I would wake up worrying about derailments and toxic spills. I was not religious, but I had an apocalyptic imagination. I grew a garden in the backyard because I wanted to be able to feed my family when civilization ended.

Spanning a breadth of time—from age 19 to her early sixties—Alvarado’s essays compile a picture of life lived in relationship to other people.  Dealing with subject matter such as heroin addiction, premature birth, and caregiving at the end of life alongside topics such as the rise in forest fires, environmental pollution, and the prison-industrial complex, the collection offers a personal-political reading experience. Alvarado zooms in close to her own experiences. Just as the circles of a rock thrown into a pond grow ever-widening, these essays broaden to illuminate the connections between an individual life and the implications of one’s individual decisions within a larger context: place, family, society-at-large.

In turn, the larger contexts inform the self. In the first essay “In a Town Ringed by Missiles,” the author writes, “I saw myself as someone who was a risk-taker. I wasn’t afraid of anything. But then I got pregnant. Suddenly, I was someone who would poison her own child, someone who was not powerful but powerless, even over her own impulses.” Calling on Piaget’s theory of cognitive dissonance, the author intones that she was forced to reckon with her self-identity. Nineteen, addicted to heroin, and pregnant, Alvarado chose relationships, family, the rocky path toward becoming powerful. She chose motherhood, marriage, writing.

And it is apparent throughout the collection—through craft and content—that Alvarado’s reckoning continues through the very act of writing. In the essay “Notes From Prague,” she writes, “I don’t know if life has a shape or if I write to give it shape. I want to take things I’ve felt deeply and make of them moments the reader can enter. Memory as a place…” It is evident that the essays were written over a handful of years, tied as they are to events that unfold over the course of as many years. Over time, Alvarado remains deeply connected to the act of writing as sense making. She wrests life into meaningful narrative, it would seem, for both herself and for her readers.

Speaking about what some might call superstition in the home of her in-laws (two egg yolks meant twins, a dropped fork means company is coming), Alvarado realized at a young age that something ineffable lies beneath the everyday. “This was when I began to see that there was another world beneath this one…” she writes, “…a world where you made sense of the disparate pieces of reality by weaving them together into a story…” Perhaps, it was that Alvarado had the eyes to see the story that lies beneath. Perhaps, she held an inherent willingness to manifest everyday experiences into extraordinary experiences through the structure of a narrative arc. In other words, to the author, events mean something. Events are not isolated nor are they isolating. In Alvarado’s world, events such as the birth of her twin grandchildren during the 2016 election, for example, are experientially, metaphorically, and temporally connected. Again, the personal extends to the political as the writer makes sense of the chaos both of said births and of the last presidential election.

In “Days of the Dead,” Alvarado writes, “If I believe in your words, I believe in your reality, and it will become a part of mine, the cells in my brain imprinted, physically changed by what I’ve heard.”  This belief—that we are changed by words—is the nervous system that runs through the collection. It is not enough to simply record what has happened. It is not enough to simply read the experiences of one woman going through the ordinary devotions of raising children, caring for the sick and aging, and burying the dead. If we readers let ourselves, we will be changed by the words we have read, words that—through their mere attention—make sacred the mundane. If we readers let ourselves be, we will be changed for the better.

Review: Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado was last modified: May 9th, 2019 by Brigitte Lewis
0 comment
1
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Brigitte Lewis
Brigitte Lewis

Brigitte Lewis is a writer born in California Gold Country destined for speculation. She is co-founding editor at Utterance Journal and a contributing editor for The Talking Cure at Entropy, and her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, The Southampton Review Online, Hobart, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She lives in Bend, OR and can always smell a mixture of juniper and sage in the air.

previous post
Foster Care: Sister Lives
next post
BLACKCACKLE: Three by Helen Chau Bradley

You may also like

Placing Your Hand in the Mouth of the Wolf: Emily Skaja’s Brute

September 17, 2020

Going Down Grand: Poems From The Canyon

October 29, 2015

“Something Beyond Dead:” a Review of Jasmine Gibson’s Don’t Let Them See Me Like This

December 3, 2018

Session Report: Mistfall and Roleplaying

June 10, 2017
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • Lisa S Thank you so much for your kind words and your feedback. I can only hope my story is able to help someone who needs it.

    WOVEN: This isn’t love ·  January 8, 2021

  • Ann Guy Thank you, Josh. And glad you didn’t get tetanus at band camp on that misguided day.

    A Way Back Home ·  December 24, 2020

  • Ann Guy Thank you, Tyler! Great to make a connection with another Fremonster. I had a wonderful catchup with your uncle while doing research for my essay. I think Fremont is a microcosm of what’s occurring...

    A Way Back Home ·  December 23, 2020

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • Food and Covid-19
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2020 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top