Echoes

In her highly innovative and polished new collection of prose-poetic echoes, Karen Lazar explores the world of disability through the low-angle lens of those who apprehend the world from a seated position and with altered perceptions and capacities. This view is offered in three elegant parts: “cranial echoes”, “joburg echoes” and “cyber echoes”, which reflect the author’s own twenty year journey through a stroke, and her adaptation to the longterm after-echoes of radical human metamorphosis. The poetic echoes are an intriguing stylistic creation, which draw the reader into a subtle written and aural landscape.

The reader is firmly interpolated as a co-narrator in the narrative journey through the ingenious device of second-person narration, wherein the reader becomes the “you” who sees via a low-angle lens.

Lazar uses her own privilege as a writing stroke survivor who has not lost language, to weave a reverberating story which we should listen to, as many in South Africa cannot tell this tale.