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Adam Tipps Weinstein

Adam Tipps Weinstein is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing, and Steffensen-Cannon fellow at the University of Utah. He is also nonfiction editor for Quarterly West. Adam lives in Salt Lake City with his wife,...

Some Versions of the Ice

Adam Tipps Weinstein

Literature | $17.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-60-8
Size: 5.5″ x 8″
Pages: 96
Binding: Softcover, Perfect


Winner of the 2014 NOS Book Contest, as selected by guest judge Fanny Howe.

In this debut collection, Adam Tipps Weinstein essays the space between fiction and non-, examining such phenomena as graveyard- shoe collecting, collars, and garden sub-plots. Such speculations result in fact-filled fabulations and histories woven from esoterica—quotes and anecdotes assembled into tapestries of synergistic references as immutable as the paper they are printed on. Some Versions of the Ice reads like a walking tour of exhibits and non-exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, where history, theory, and philosophy merge, become poetic.

Advance Praise for Some Versions of the Ice:

“A flourish of secrets underlying cuffs and garden plots and the ice so fast approaching and receding. This is a happy book, sinister undertones reserved for the reader to recognize, if they are there at all. I love information. Uncanny information. The subplot and the reason for versions rather than certainties. Some Versions of the Ice is special, an original.”

—Fanny Howe

Some Versions of the Ice explores liminal spaces: where the real meets the unreal, where the physical world becomes imbued with the sublime. In their tension between order and chaos, Weinstein’s essays both formally and tonally dissolve the boundaries between myth and reality, appropriation and invention, nonfiction and fiction as they describe our search for permanence and order in an essentially chaotic world. With subjects ranging from ‘graveyard shoes’ to Frankenstein, from gardening to Renaissance ruffs, Weinstein’s essays merge the erudition of Anne Carson with the speculative intelligence of Borges, all while investigating the ways our species both creates and inspires awe. It is a hybrid field guide, an artist’s book, a personal cabinet of wonders. Weinstein’s book is a marvelous debut, one that I believe will beguile and bemuse, and ultimately captivate the reader.”

—Paisley Rekdal

“The stunningly erudite essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s Some Versions of Ice are way beyond acrobatic ‘attempts.’ They are controlled crashes of trying language and heady concoctions of crazed content. Imagine (and you must imagine) Emerson ordaining the hieros gamos of Jorge Luis Borges to the conjoined twins of Susan Sontag and Martha Stewart. Here, Weinstein’s hyper-rational empiricism runs stoically and joyfully amok. He is the deadpanniest of deadpan prospectors, panning boatloads of precious metal, assaying whole new states of mannered matter.”

—Michael Martone