RECOMMENDED BY AMANDA

This book is a work of art from the inside, out. The cover is magnificent, and the stories inside are artfully written--no, birthed--from their author, Santa Fe native, Ramona Ausubel. I'd read a couple of Ausbuel's stories before in other publications, but the way they fit together in one bound volume is similar to how bones fit into a spine.

The stories in A Guide to Being Born share a common element of rumination about our physical bodies in relation to the pyscho-spiritual beasts within us. Whether she is portraying conflicted parents who must make life decisions about the body of their disabled child or a family who tries unsuccessfully to lay to rest their dead cat, Ausbuel has an uncanny way of reminding readers that the bodies we live in are only vessels for our larger, more enduring lives we live and cease to live. The sections of the book are divided according to the life cycle and are arranged backward in time through birth, gestation, conception, and love.

Whether it be the body's diverse states of being or psycho-spiritual journeys her characters are on, Ausubel's ride is a surreal, magical, and fantastical one in which her characters--mothers, fathers, partners. the dearly departed--face the struggles of life and death within a finite physical body. Parterning and parenting, dreaming and loving are common themes in all these stories, which are simulatneously touching and disturbing, beautiful and hideous, magical and real, and always sublim.