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A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone
Joe Baumann
“These stories are both deeply human and deeply weird. Like a queer Aimee Bender, Baumann tackles coming-of-age, sex, and love, alongside floating houses, jogging ghosts, and broken hearts locked up in cages. In these surreal stories, the metaphoric is made literal.”
—Robin Becker, author of Brains: A Zombie Memoir
Queer intimacies, queer worlds
Flowers bloom from the body of a man after his lover’s touch. Grieving parents find a way to communicate with their lost children. A teacher with water in his veins is held accountable when the extracurricular club he advises goes rogue. In these and other fantastical stories, Joe Baumann explores relationships, mostly queer, through the lens of the bizarre.
The stories in A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone are told in lyrical, often startling prose. Baumann’s experimentation with the surreal avoids gimmick and easy metaphor, keeping the complexity of the characters at the center. The strange worlds of these protagonists distort and reflect our own back to us, like the funhouse mirrors in “Morphology” that begin to change the fabric of reality.
Ultimately, we may not want to live in a world in which our broken hearts are on display in external birdcages attached to our bodies. But Baumann’s sophisticated, nuanced storytelling makes us wonder, however briefly, whether such a world might be preferable to ours. The emotional poignancy at the heart of each of these stories reaches across the strangeness of all of our possible worlds, tying us together in the universal search for connection.
Joe Baumann is the chair of the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University. He is the author of Lake, Drive: A Novel, Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, and Tell Me: Stories.
Author's Website - Joebaumann.wordpress.com
Praise
“In a surreal world of disappearing limbs, living paintings, and hearts kept in cages, Baumann deftly explores the deepest human complexities of love, loss, connection, and heartbreak. A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone is a work of astonishing compassion and originality.”
—Kent Quaney, author of One Breath from Drowning
Table of Contents
Exoskeleton
Do to Me What I Can Do to You
Still Life
Kiss Blossoms
A River in Your Chest
Message
The Forgetter
After Glow
Take Me Somewhere, Bring Me Back
Before Something Else Is Gone
Snow Birds
The House on the Edge of the Canyon
Morphology
Sons of the Sleeping Mothers
Delicate Creature
Inflation
Where You Go, I’ll Follow
Home Wrecker
A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone
Twilight in Heroland
Acknowledgments
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Larger images
March 2025
232 pp. 5.5 x 8.5
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