Arrive Astray.png
Arrive Astray.png

Arrive Astray

£10.00

AUTHOR: Annemarie Reichenbach

to: those who feel for place and the disappearance of it; those who seek their path between caring for self and other

from: a few square kilometres of East German fields and forests around winter

This is an intimate invitation for those grieving shifts and turns while still witnessing what remains—there, but not quite as it was. This is a dreaming-into how my brother's life can also be a collective story, seeking permission and understanding while longing to build it. 

In my twenties, I witnessed my brother’s life take a different route, while the way we experienced seasons shifted and our childhood forest disappeared. These noticings seek community on the page and hope to extend empathy beyond it, offering radical permission to honour both loss and hope, to inhabit the both/and while orienting within nature’s cycles. It asks what it means to be kin with inner and outer landscapes amid ambiguous loss, and how to relearn what it means to be alive and a sister in this current world. The chapbook became a letter that could not be sent— an invitation to hold disappearance and devotion, devastation and care, all at once.

Arrive Astray is part of our chapbook series, emerging from the older tradition. Chapbooks were traditionally printed and sold between the 17th and 19th centuries and took the form of a small printed booklet, usually containing a selection of poetry or fiction. The aim was to make literature affordable and accessible. You can read more about them here.

This A5 chapbook is printed in the UK on 100% recycled paper using vegetable-based inks.

AUTHOR: Annemarie Reichenbach

to: those who feel for place and the disappearance of it; those who seek their path between caring for self and other

from: a few square kilometres of East German fields and forests around winter

This is an intimate invitation for those grieving shifts and turns while still witnessing what remains—there, but not quite as it was. This is a dreaming-into how my brother's life can also be a collective story, seeking permission and understanding while longing to build it. 

In my twenties, I witnessed my brother’s life take a different route, while the way we experienced seasons shifted and our childhood forest disappeared. These noticings seek community on the page and hope to extend empathy beyond it, offering radical permission to honour both loss and hope, to inhabit the both/and while orienting within nature’s cycles. It asks what it means to be kin with inner and outer landscapes amid ambiguous loss, and how to relearn what it means to be alive and a sister in this current world. The chapbook became a letter that could not be sent— an invitation to hold disappearance and devotion, devastation and care, all at once.

Arrive Astray is part of our chapbook series, emerging from the older tradition. Chapbooks were traditionally printed and sold between the 17th and 19th centuries and took the form of a small printed booklet, usually containing a selection of poetry or fiction. The aim was to make literature affordable and accessible. You can read more about them here.

This A5 chapbook is printed in the UK on 100% recycled paper using vegetable-based inks.

 


About the author

One of Annemarie’s first memories is that of holding a pen to draw suns or write letters to her Grandma straight onto the wallpaper. Since then, she has barely put the pen down or spent her money on anything else other than stationery. Also, she never stopped dreaming herself into far away places and archetypal stories. In her family of creative outlets, writing shares a seat on the table -often cluttered- with painting large abstract canvasses. She somehow always comes back to expressing the contrasting experiences between growing up a highly sensitive being in the middle of nowhere and spending her twenty-somethings in various cities with a curiosity to navigate life according to natural and body-led rhythms as well as interconnectedness. She remains drawn to pioneering fields of care, for example in her current research on Societal Transformation through Creative and Ecological Health. Her life goal is to one day own a place that hosts all kinds of beings in their liminal life stages to make art, rest and feel into the complexity of being human together - preferably surrounded by the various landscapes that let the horizon dance. Until then, she aims to make as much time as possible for sharing colourful meals with her kin from all over the world, live music and watching her quince trees grow. This chapbook is her most personal work yet.