"In language as charged as the air between lovers, Barrie Jean Borich offers us a gorgeous and tender aria to marriage. She tells of discovering with astonishment, through twelve years of devotion to the same sturdy woman, how much she delights in fidelity. She tells of slowly weaving her unsanctioned love into the fabric of her family, in among brothers and sisters-in-law, among nieces and nephews and wary parents. She describes the alchemy of turning a house into a home. Through it all, she writes like a woman possessed-- enraptured by the sensual pleasures of words, by the power of stories, by the gravity of neighborhood. She reminds us that marriage is made not by the joining of bodies shaped a certain way, but by the joining of two lives, careers, and histories in one place, in one embrace."

Scott Russell Sanders

Barrie Jean Borich is the winner of many literary awards and is the author of Restoring the Color of Roses (Firebrand Books), a memoir set in the Calumet region of Chicago where she grew up. Today she lives with her beloved, Linnea Stenson, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and teaches at Hamline University and Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award