Julia Koets - The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays

Julia Koetss collection of essays, The Rib Joint, is a marvel of form and content: this dazzling writer has created a guidebook for growing up queer in the American South. Told with honesty, humor, and pathos, each of these essays is a testament to human endurance and dignity. Oh, how lucky we all are to have this book in the world.

Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer

If a girl grows up in a small town, writes Julia Koets in one of many haunting fragments from her nonfiction debut, The Rib Joint. No one hears of girls falling for girls there. Or we didntnot oftenuntil now. I love poets like Koets who turn to memoir to plumb their histories, who enrich the fourth genre with elegant rhythms, relentless inspections of language, and images that smolder long after the page is turned. I love this book for all these reasons, so tender, incisive, and pulsing with truth that it seems to have a heartbeat all its own.

Julie Marie Wade, author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Winner of the Lambda Literary Award

Julia Koetss debut memoir, The Rib Joint, is as intellectually capacious as it is emotionally charged. Although these essays read as stand-alone stars, the full force of the book is in its constellation of vivid juxtapositions: queer theory and secret kisses, okra and Greek myth, azaleas and Christian dogma, covert lesbian desire expressed in the bright landscape of the South. Beneath the lyrical, urgent meditations of the speaker is a clarity of self, a wariness of essentialist philosophies about the dynamics of love, and a deep awareness of the intersections of self and place. Yet, her luminous imagery and beautifully wrought colloquial cadences create a style of abundance. This is a work that is grounded in the particular but resonates out and out, as Koets herself tells us in the books titular essay: Narratives of queerness are infinite. They do not always begin at birth. They cannot always be traced to childhood. A story can begin in medias res, as a wave begins in the middle of the ocean.

Danielle Deulen, author of The Riots

In this powerful and urgent memoir, Julia Koets shifts artfully between narrative modesconfessional, axiomatic, lyrical, metaphorical, scholarly. The formal restlessness generates both feeling and meaning, and it is a most compelling way to convey the authors struggle for identity.

Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special, National Book Award Finalist

Julia Koets

Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays

Copyright 2019 by Julia Koets

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

AUTHORS NOTE: The names and certain identifying characteristics of some people in my life have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Koets, Julia, author.

Title: The rib joint : a memoir in essays / Julia Koets.

Description: First edition. | Pasadena : Red Hen Press, [2019] | 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033844 (print) | LCCN 2019033845 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597096751 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098410 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Koets, Julia. | Women authors, American20th centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC PS3611.O38 Z46 2019 (print) | LCC PS3611.O38 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033844

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

Thank you to Mark Doty for selecting The Rib Joint for the 2017 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award, and to Mark and Kate and all of the staff at Red Hen Press for their support and generosity.

Thank you to all of my teachers and mentors for their kindness and support, especially Danielle Deulen, Christine Mok, John Drury, and Kristen Iversen, who all read sections of this book in various stages. Thank you to Rachel Toliver, for her sharp and invaluable edits and comments, for helping me make this book better.

Thank you to all the friends who supported me and provided me with thoughtful feedback during the writing of this book, especially those in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati: Linwood Rumney, Sarah Rose Nordgren, Rochelle Hurt, Lisa Summe, Anne Valente, Sara Watson, and Dan Groves.

Thank you to Hannah Godwin, whose company during garden walks helped sustain me as I worked on the final edits of this book. Thank you to Kelly Blewett, for taking walks in cemeteries and for always asking me what Im thinking about. Thank you to Jacqui Simmons Groves, for reading countless drafts of this book, and for always knowing the right questions to ask.

Thank you to the people who trusted me with these stories. Thank you to the girl who taught me how to drive stick-shift in her Volkswagen Rabbit. Thank you to the girl who taught me how to eat a pomegranate. Thank you to the girl who loved the linden trees. Thank you to the girl who taught me about bioluminescence. Thank you to the girl who walked with me everywhere during our childhood. Thank you to the girl who left something in Barbados and who taught me how to talk more openly.

Thank you to Lindsey, for writing back when I wrote, What do you teach?

Thank you to my brother for growing up right beside me. And thank you, most of all, to my parentsfor planting an azalea when I was born and for telling me it was okay to doubt.

for my grandmother, Julia Stinson Pharr,
who showed me how to float on my back in the ocean
and how to write a good letter

... [E]ven people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes [of family, love, work, play, etc.] may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.

Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

On June 18, 1983, nearly three months after I was born, NASAs seventh space shuttle mission departed from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. On board was Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.