Time-Scolded

Essay Chapbook

ISBN: 978-1-957746-26-5

Across countries and languages, between loved ones and lost ones, through dreams and indecisions, Katie Culligan gifts the reader with Time-Scolded: a prose chapbook at once thrilling in its lyricism and mournful under the threat of military violence and dissolution. The twelve interconnected essay segments peel back, layer by layer, the concepts of time, place, and belonging, and ask what it means to be domestic or foreign, citizen or guest. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s impending occupation of Ukraine, the narrator and her companions—her students, fiancé, and the ghost of her sister—navigate “the physical rules of the world” with the knowledge that “perspective is fighting against itself.” Meditations on “farness” and “far-away-ness” are punctured by moments of dreamlike humor and imagistic imaginings. Time-Scolded is, at its core, an apocalypse in the truest sense of the word: a revelation.