front cover of As If Fire Could Hide Us
As If Fire Could Hide Us
Melanie Rae Thon
University of Alabama Press, 2023
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.
 
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front cover of Silence & Song
Silence & Song
Melanie Rae Thon
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Immigrants lost in the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert, problem bears, bats pollinating saguaros, a Good Samaritan filling tanks at emergency water stations, and the terrified runaway boy who shoots him pierce the heart and mind of Rosana Derais. “Vanishings,” the first story in Silence & Song, is a love letter, a prayer to these strangers whose lives penetrate and transform Rosana’s own sorrow.
 
In “Translations,” the prose poem connecting the two longer fictions, child refugees at a multilingual literacy center in Salt Lake City discover the merciful “translation” of dance and pantomime.
 
The convergence of two disparate events—a random murder in Seattle and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl—catalyze the startling, eruptive form of the concluding piece,“requiem: home: and the rain, after.” Narrated in first person by the killer’s sister and plural first person by the “liquidators” who come to the Evacuation Zone to bury entire villages poisoned by radioactive fallout, “requiem” navigates the immediate trauma of murder and environmental disaster; personal and global devastation; and the remarkable recovery of the miraculously diverse more-than-human world. 
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front cover of The Voice of the River
The Voice of the River
A Novel
Melanie Rae Thon
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Missing:  seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia.
 
The search for these two spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered.  Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night  “when the father was kind, and not afraid, and not angry.”  Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community.  As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family—bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather. 

The perceiving consciousness is oceanic and atmospheric, embracing all living beings, swirling around a person, a bird, a bear, trillium blooming in dark woods, snow, stones, pines singing—moving closer and closer, loving, finally merging, sensing and knowing as one, before lightly whirling out again to embrace and love another. This powerful current of shared memory and experience, this ceaseless prayer, is a celebration of life,  all  life, mystery and miracle within an immense animate landscape, a song of praise, the voice of the river.

Melanie Rae Thon opens a new genre: call it Eco Avant-Garde, a confession of faith, and a love song to the world.
 
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