“Jordan Kisner’s essays range from circling her curiosity around a neurosurgical procedure for obsessive compulsive disorder, to reporting on a debutante ball in a Texas border town where Mexican American girls dress as Martha Washington, to shadowing a medical examiner performing autopsies in Cleveland. What unites them all is an exploration of the liminal – states of in-between, or the titular “thin places,” where potential and tension swell. Kisner’s curiosity is contagious, and as she glides smoothly between cultural commentary, reportage and personal probing, she illuminates how flimsy boundaries are when we look at them hard enough.”
~ Kristen Martin, NPR’s “Best Books of 2020”
Praise for Thin Places:
“Kisner displays an impressive range of narrative modes in this book, bouncing nimbly between gravity (in her ethnography and her bird’s-eye philosophizing) and comic relief…. pulling the reader along on her journey to excavate the intimate from the observed.”
- New York Times Book Review
“With this collection, Jordan takes her place among the next generation of American Transcendentalists, and those true essayists for whom nothing human is too strange to write about, even the wish to be something more than individual and more than human. She’s one of the few contemporary writers who knows how to bridge spiritual and temporal worlds, but who’s also able to alter and expand our understanding of the metaphors we live by through immersive research and writing.”
- Marco Roth, n+1
“Kisner’s writing is unflinching, written with a curious and open mind and heart. She’s like a physician, taking the pulse of society, and sharing the results matter-of-factly, without judgment. This debut collection marks Kisner as a voice to listen to.”
- Chicago Review of Books
“Thoughtful, engaging, and informative essays from a writer to watch.”
- Kirkus Review
“Kisner reliably hints at where her essays are going (we learn to take note of her titles, for example), but she leaves us pleasingly startled when we arrive at her final destinations. She hasn’t tricked us, I don’t think. She has just outpaced us.”
- Image Journal
“Thin Places bristles with intelligence. Kisner has effectively announced her arrival to the pantheon of American nonfiction writers.”
- Shelf Awareness
“…an unsettling and an endlessly curious read.”
- Electric Literature
“Kisner exposes the rules human beings have enforced on one other in order to cope with their fear, mortality, and permeability. And with unique empathy and intelligence, she ponders how American communities and she herself might begin to question their orthodoxies and experience a new kind of vulnerability and faith.”
- Poets & Writers
“With humor and razor-sharp insight, Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places: Essays From in Between captures the visceral, palpable feeling of loss…[she] gracefully guide[s] us through our own emptiness in search of fullness”
- BookPage
Kisner follows the associational logic of a poet. She shows us, through order and diction rather than on-the-nose thematic ligatures, the links and leaps and divots among the book’s 13 essays.
- Christian Century
“…couldn't be more timely.”
- Bustle
"Jordan Kisner’s essays are like intricate tattoos: etched with a sharp and exacting blade of intellect, but made of flesh; richly drawn in their details; comprised of equal parts pleasure and pain. Like tattoos, their natural habitat is that strange borderland where our skin meets the world—where we confront our edges, or everything we can’t keep out. Always, and thrillingly, they look inward and outward with exacting grace."
- Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams & The Recovering
“Jordan Kisner ventures into the operating room where a surgeon inserts an electrode into a patient’s brain. She travels to a forest whose now-imperiled trees – quaking aspens -- have been alive a “since humans began to use tools, and possibly since we discovered fire.” She mingles with the debutantes of Laredo Texas as they navigate the fraught space between Wasp and Hispanic privilege; she mingles with a group of Mormon women as they work for progressive political change. Wherever she is, Kisner probes the ambiguities that we live and dream, exploring the spaces where, in her words, “Distinctions between you and – not-you, real and and unworldly, fall away.” She is a tender but fierce writer; rigorous and wise.”
- Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland
"Jordan Kisner sees reality with a telescopic, infrared focus uniquely suited to illuminating the hidden, forgotten, or obscured nooks of our cultural moment, excavating the longings and unspoken affinities that lie just beneath the surface. With revelatory grace and insight, these essays refract the world you might think you know in a new and brilliant light."
- Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
"Jordan Kisner’s essays are a bewitchingly original and highly personal synthesis of incisiveness, gracefulness, thoughtfulness, and selflessness. She is an intellectual empath with the deepest moral instincts and a willingness to consider herself alongside her subjects, as a person no more or less worthy of attention. Her work gives me the feeling that I’m being told an urgent secret about humanity that is meant to be savored, then shared."
- Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock
These singular "encounters with the ineffable" are full of risk and daring, urgency and contact. They confront species of belief head-on without relinquishing doubt. Beautifully lyrical and observant, Kisner's fresh voice speaks with uncanny consolation to this extreme, seemingly apocalyptic moment.
- Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head