Jim W. Corder

"Symbols of Selfhood - of emotional/psychic healing and wholeness, of reconciliation between Corder-the-child and Corder-the-man - lie scattered throughout: buried tins, baseball gloves, West Texas sunsets, hill sides, mesquite trees, ghost towns, dirt roads all take on archetypal meaning, putting the narrator in touch with the Jungian "Self" or Soul. Of particular note in Corder's lifelong Soul-questing is his struggle to love - to rightly value the "anima" or archetypal feminine; he expresses this struggle through dream imagery and fragments of memory, including lost photographs. But of all the markers of Corder's Soul-questing, the most poignant is his last: his description of his grandmother's quilt-making, whose intricate (yet homemade) patterns express the true American folk-mandala, symbolic of psychic wholeness."--Jacket.