“Combining lyrical prose with a haunting narrative, Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize–winner Palm recounts a story filled with secret longings, family history, and musings on what might have been...this is a memoir to linger over, savor and study.”

“Densely symbolic, unsentimental, and eloquent, Palm’s book explores the connections between yearning, desire, and homecoming with subtlety and lucidity. The result is a narrative that maps the complex relationships that exist between individual identity and place. An intelligent, evocative, and richly textured memoir.”

“Reading Angela Palm’s startlingly original memoir is like talking with a smart, quirky friend whose free associations and academic digressions, while sometimes baffling, always make you think. Palm grew up in depressed rural Indiana, her childhood marked by isolation. When she was a teen, a childhood crush was sentenced to life for double homicide. For years, this fact haunted her until she visits him in prison to try to understand what happened. Written as a series of narrative essays peppered with eclectic references to Joan Didion and Tupac Shakur, Riverine is an honest exploration of exile and belonging, destruction and growth.”

“Riverine digs deep into the soil of the past—river soil, corn field soil, flooded soil and stubborn soil—to find not only the roots of the future, in all of its mysterious convolutions and divergences, but also the possibility of futures that never came to pass. Angela Palm’s gorgeous candor sings urgently through these pages, her prose a tuning fork offering frequencies I’d never heard before.”

“Riverine is a stop-and-think kind of book, and a stay-up-all-night kind of book, as well, a quest for a place that isn’t quite there, but that grows more real page by page, even as we rush to flee it. Angela Palm offers a fresh voice and shows us the heartland we’re least likely to hear about, those fruited plains dotted with prisons and parties and families that don’t quite fly, even as these chapters soar. A beautiful book, heartfelt but literary, blunt but poetic, moving and wise, funny, too. And best of all, a river runs through it. ”

“Angela Palm’s Riverine is the stuff good memoir is made of: a personal narrative rich in metaphor and insight that finds meaning in those memories that confused us as children, made us squirm as adults. A truly lovely book crafted with exquisite language.”

“Palm delivers a lyrical story—we come of age with her as she navigates a complicated landscape within and surrounding her. She breaks rules in life. She breaks rules on the page. Language is her essence here. There are sentences so arresting, I paused and paused and paused to absorb them.”

“With a probing curiosity for the topography of both the land and the mind, Angela Palm maps out a world of deep quiet, loneliness, and sudden violence. Riverine reminds us that, while their land may be flat, the lives of those who populate our prairies and flood plains are anything but.”

“Haunting and surprising, and yet immediately relatable, Angela Palm’s striking memoir sinks its roots deep into its readers, and holds fast. Everything ordinary, Palm reveals, is extraordinary—tragic, profound, amusing, brutal—when examined up close. In reflecting on her own formative years, growing up ‘between points on the map’ in small-town Indiana, she paints a measured but unforgettable portrait of the forces that break us free of our origins, and of those that inevitably call us back.”

“It sounds so trite to say, but I just fell in love with this book. And with Angela Palm, the Every Girl at the center of the story, with her observations on family and the stickiness of your hometown and neighborhood—you want so bad to leave, but when you do, you can’t stop thinking about what’s missing. About what you left behind. The boy you left behind. The boy who left you. Without spoiling it, Angela’s journey towards and away from and eventually back to Corey, the love of her young girl’s heart, honestly brought me to tears. It’s one of those memoirs that brings your own memories, your own past, up to the surface as you read her recollections, her regrets, sorrow, and the joy. God, it just broke my heart over and over again. I loved it. Loved.”

“With Riverine, Angela Palm’s probing intelligence sinks deeply into her past, especially the places and people that have shaped her personality, surfacing to show us what time has changed, and what’s remained the same. She writes with disarming lucidity about the complexities of memory, community, family, the ties that bind, and the ties that come apart. Of her brother, Palm writes, ‘His mind didn’t wake up with “Why?” in it like mine did.’ Why does life, and love, conspire to thwart Palm’s kidhood dreams of escape? Why doesn’t the center hold? Why write about it? Riverine’s readers will be glad to meet Palm’s inquiring mind, and grateful for the elegance of her answer.”