Through protagonist Maeve Wolf, Post Rock Limestone Caryatids explores life in a future in which genetically modified people live their lives in cubicles, accessing the world entirely through media. Wracked by fear and self-doubt, Maeve longs desperately for connection with other people, especially her infant niece.
Then Jabar appears, to proselytize Maeve. Or does he have some other motive? Next thing she knows, she’s leaving her cube forever, thrown into the high-tech squalor of a squatters’ camp in Manhattan, Kansas; discovering scrappy small-time thief Cal; meeting the vast, open prairie of the Flint Hills.
She also meets the Sisters of the Star, itinerant ladies in service to the needy; and Valie, a woman seeking to give her unborn child what she herself can never have: freedom from the bonds of genetic manipulation.
Themes of technology, popular culture, religion, and child development intertwine; part dystopian sci fi, part womens’ lit, part nature writing, Post Rock Limestone Caryatids is a story that could not be confined to one genre. The only way to know what this book is about is to read it.
“And the writing, at the paragraph and sentence level, frequently bares its beauty in a range from scatological to sublime, though in the least pretentious of ways. One could read many passages as the journal of a writer who has herself plumbed both the mysteries and fears of homo sapiens childbirth, and the macro-birthing process of Mother Earth. Ireland could become one of the few legitimate woman naturalists–though this is only one of the book’s several modes–a tradition dominated by males in America since the 1870s.” —Shawn St. Jean, author, Clotho’s Loom