{"product_id":"a-flat-place-moving-through-empty-landscapes-naming-complex-9781685890247b","title":"A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma","description":"\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: bold;\"\u003eA surprising and lyrical journey—part memoir, part nature book—meditating on the meaning of \"flatness\" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature’s most undervalued wonders.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eFor readers of Dr. Gabor Maté's \u003ci style=\"\"\u003eThe Myth of Normal, \u003c\/i\u003eRobert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's \u003ci style=\"\"\u003eRings of Saturn\u003c\/i\u003e, Amy Liptrot's \u003ci style=\"\"\u003eThe Outrun\u003c\/i\u003e, and Richard Mabey's \u003ci style=\"\"\u003eNature Cure\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDoes the concept of \"flat\" have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries’ worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNoreen Masud suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the  product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens  her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with  anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking  solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world  with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own  early life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMasud's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a  partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised,  inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of  pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's  power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that  resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the  flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid  and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMasud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. \u003ci\u003eA Flat Place\u003c\/i\u003e is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place — bodily and psychologically — and the healing properties of literature and landscape.","brand":"Melville House","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42822721732688,"sku":"9781685890247B","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9781685890247-l.jpg?v=1785889240","url":"https:\/\/bookoutlet.com\/products\/a-flat-place-moving-through-empty-landscapes-naming-complex-9781685890247b","provider":"Book Outlet","version":"1.0","type":"link"}