Acknowledgments
Wisteria
New Ventures
Notes in a Time of War
Monsters among Trees
Children of Paradise
Cheap Seats
Eternal Machinery
Exotic Dennis
Unrecognized Prophets
Stop-Time: An Interlude
Temples of Inscription
Vegetable Chow Mein Pizza
Sacred Ground
Urushiol
Validating Rhyme
Boats and Starships
Fallen Basilica
Patterns of Organic Energy
Still Life with Raccoon
Punishment
Fire Dance
Sascha Feinstein is professor of English and co-director of the Creative Writing Program at Lycoming College.
Family wreckage is often hidden, abiding in unshared memories. For
good or ill, much of Feinstein’s past was all too tangible. His
father, Sam, an artist and teacher, rescued and hoarded discards,
which slowly formed massive mounds that destroyed all three of his
large homes. His seemingly worthless collectibles were important
because he deemed them so, perhaps, writes his son, because of
Sam’s Ukrainian-refugee background, which was ‘saturated with loss
and recovery, financial tragedy and constant regrowth’ and made him
‘covet free, discarded artifacts.’ Ultimately, Feinstein had to
dismantle and cart away a forest of choking wisteria, dead trees,
and poison ivy as well as broken furniture, hardened cement chunks,
and other junk Sam had used artistically from his Cape Cod house,
along with masses of animal excrement from a shed. In all, 30 tons
of refuse had at be removed to save the structures. Feinstein’s
chronicle of this demanding effort is an uncompromising,
philosophical, and powerful excavation and analysis of one family’s
history and dynamics.
*Booklist*
Just as his father, a “master scavenger,” made art from things he
found, Sascha Feinstein has fashioned a beautiful book out of the
hard facts, peculiar love, and brilliant ruins that are his
relationship with his father. Wreckage tells the moving story of
the father, this great architect of junk who lives in his “paradise
of accumulation,” and the difficult but persistent love of the son.
In Feinstein’s pages I felt transported back to an older Cape Cod,
of dump-picking and ticks and drive-ins, and to a time before
antiseptic, air-conditioned homes when quirky beauty counted, and
where that beauty grew hidden amidst the brambles. In the end,
Wreckage is the story of love and reclamation, of making something
out of what was lost.
*David Gessner, author of Return of the Osprey and All the Wild
That Remains*
“Taking on the wreckage,” Sascha Feinstein writes of the
overwhelming, impossible legacy of junk the artist and hoarder who
raised him left behind, “meant taking on my father.” This book is
his accounting: desperate and funny, horrifying and artful, and
much less bitter than it had every right to be. If the father’s
legacy suffocates, his son’s accomplishment is to find not only
room to breathe, but the gifts and challenges that launch a young
writer on his way. The buoyancy required to survive a father’s
excess becomes a son’s source of strength, enabling him to
build—with the good help of poetry, jazz, and the movies—a self and
a family, and even to restore a nearly ruined house to radiant
life.
*Mark Doty, author of Heaven's Coast*
In Wreckage, Sascha Feinstein becomes an archeologist of his
father’s leavings, both physical and emotional. From three houses
and from an overgrown lot on Cape Cod, all crammed with a bizarre
accumulation of stuff, he salvages rare moments of inspiration and
joy. In so doing, he fulfills his father’s dream of “transforming
junk into beauty.”
*Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe*
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