Carousel: An Essay on Seeing - Hardcover

by Sarah Minor (Author)

From an award-winning writer, a critical reflection on the human desire to see and be seen

Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a lecture to a hot room. Her students have the internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing in more directions than students ever could before. But what, in fact, are they looking at?

In the spirit of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor's Carousel explores how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates both viewer and subject. Across short, loping sections that weave history with memoir, close looking with confession, Minor masterfully fuses the slide lecture with the lyric essay, tying medieval tapestries to surrealism and Instagram reels to predator drones. In language that captures the disorientation of that other carousel, the whirling carnival ride, Minor shows how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.

Author Biography

Sarah Minor is the author of two previous books, Bright Archive and Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, as well as the chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated. She teaches writing at the University of Iowa. Minor lives in Iowa City, IA.