Kore Press (paperback, 2016)
Publisher Marketing: In the mid-1920s, Mary Taylor Alger Smith followed her husband Lieutenant Commander Roy C. Smith, Jr. from Annapolis to Shanghai with their four children. GIRAFFES OF DEVOTION excavates the transcript of her oral history given to the U.S. Naval Institute. Boxed in newspaper columns, fragments, repetitions, and silences, history and human lives are broken apart and pieced together through language. Framed within the domestic sphere of military service, facts and speech are misheard, whispered, indexed and reassembled to reveal the word made spirit. An erasure of a historical text filtered through family lore, the new narrative creates a rebelliously voiced witness and investigator into the history of family, nation, and war.
