A love song in three movements

As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.

A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.

A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.

An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria—desolation, peace, despair, rapture.
 

Melanie Rae Thon is a recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency. She is the composer of thirteen works of fiction and poetry.
 

“Melanie Rae Thon’s As If Fire Could Hide Us is that rare achievement: intimate, yet kaleidoscopic, poetic yet grounded in narrative, scientific and spiritual at once. As this book unfolds across three genre-bending movements, Thon reveals the ways in which we are each connected to every other—through attention and imagination, through violence and social responsibility, through the very cells of our bodies and the natural world around us. Thon’s narratives leap from consciousness to consciousness, unveiling the ways we might each, if momentarily, touch upon the interior life of another. As If Fire Could Hide Us asks monumental questions of its readers: What responsibility do we have to each other when, whether by accident or design, we commit great harm? How do the memories and lives of others move through and even change our own bodies?  Can we love strangers with the same depth as we love our family members and ourselves? And if so, what risks attend that love? As If Fire Could Hide Us is a work of great and radical empathy, a work of moral philosophy, a work of love.”
—Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale and Intimate: An American Family Photo Album

“At the heart of this extraordinary and extraordinarily moving lyrical trinity resides an utterly unique vision embracing a profound Christian mysticism inflected by an Eastern pantheism, where all things, all people, all atoms are connected, rich with cosmic love, with human longing, with bodily and spiritual pain, with gnawing desperation. As If Fire Could Hide Us is an exultation of tenderness, sorrow, and, in the end, open-armed affirmation in the face of the whirled world, a stunning exploration of moving beyond all-too-familiar conceptions of time, place, identity, and narrativity.” 
—Lance Olsen, author of  Always Crashing in the Same Car and My Red Heaven

" As If Fire Could Hide Us is at once all genres, an experiential rumination whose form embodies its spiritual teachings, illuminates what we too often forget—the cosmos of connection in which we exist and the ramifications of this knowledge. . . [It] is a beautifully singular read; it will change your life—don't miss it."
—Michelle Donahue, Sugar House Reviews.— -