About the Book: Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America
Acclaimed New Yorker contributor Lauren Michele Jackson delivers an essay
collection devoted to the back—and the conflicting ideas we load onto it.
Moving across literature, film, sport, visual art, and U.S. history, Jackson
probes how the back has carries powerful ideas about beauty, gender, labor,
race, and political solidarity. Here the back emerges as a site of vulnerability
and desire, embodiment and rhetoric, dependence and resistance.
Jacksons prose effortlessly shifts between conversational and intellectual,
inviting readers into digressions that illuminate rather than distract in a set
of ranging essays, alighting