Author: Lizz Schumer

Publisher:

Published: 2013-10

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9781612962580

After growing up under the twin specters of the shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant and the cross-topped spires that shadow the dreams of its residents, Buffalo Steel finds its narrator setting off to seek her own spirit, away from the forces that forged her. Firmly grounded in the historical and cultural context of the Queen City, this lyrical journey explores how a child raised in a conservative, religious culture can free herself from the bonds that made her, without losing her place in that world. Through a series of stories connected by threads of historical anecdotes and biblical touchstones, the narrator explores her own changing views on what it means to be part of a society, whether by birth, assimilation or a combination of the two. After a spiritual awakening leaves her skeptical of the world in which she was raised, she seeks solace in a Catholic college that offers faint echoes of the home that cradled her childhood. There, she learns to worship at new altars, as the university culture infiltrates her quest for meaning. That quest sees her travel to Oxford, Dublin, Italy, Washington D.C. and back again, finding displacement and disillusionment everywhere she lands. Along the way, she discovers that her identity has been waiting all along: not in a foreign apartment or a Buffalo bedroom, but in their incorporation into one holistic concept of personhood, within a world she has learned to create from the filings of who she was always been destined to become.