Bound

The  essays in James McKean’s Bound constitute a tribute to the women in his family. Gratitude is their motivating impulse, but they’re not sentimental. He’s too good a writer not to wrestle with conflict and ambiguity. McKean accomplishes many things simultaneously. His pieces are intricately and solidly constructed: writers can learn from them. He revives a lost place and time, the Pacific Northwest of the mid-twentieth century. His sentences are perfectly weighted and balanced, his images arresting and memorable. His catalogs of particulars and long descriptive passages flow down the page so gracefully that they seem to end too soon. A marvelous collection.

James McKean’s new collection Bound is a treasure trove of personal essays that lives up to its name. Not only will the reader be gratefully tethered by woven threads of near endless curiosity and honest contemplation, one will also find, inherent in the presented imagination, a narrative responsibility wherein mutual discovery—for both writer and reader—becomes a shared destination. To read Bound is to be held by and simultaneously released into a generosity, a richness that is the writer’s genius. PAR.