Three Kinds of Motion

Come hear Riley Hanick read from his new book, out from Sarabande. Here’s the publisher’s description: 

“In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a mural from Jackson Pollock to hang in the entryway of her Manhattan townhouse. It was the largest Pollock canvas she would ever own, and four years later she gave it to a small midwestern institution with no place to put it. ‘Please enjoy the most valuable object in Iowa,’ Riley Hanick beckons as he chronicles the young lives of two Jacks–Pollock and Kerouac. When the original scroll of On the Road goes on tour across the country, it lands at the same Iowa museum housing Peggy’s Pollock, revitalizing Hanick’s adolescent fascination with the author. Alongside these two narrative threads, Hanick revisits Dwight D. Eisenhower’s quest to build America’s first interstate highway system. ‘Expressionless, Adorno will call our roads,’ Hanick writes. ‘They seem somehow to have always been there.’ When catastrophic rains flood the Iowa highways with their famous allure and history of conquest, they also threaten the museum and its precious mural. In Three Kinds of Motion, his razor-sharp, funny, and intensely vulnerable book-length essay, Hanick moves deftly between his three subjects. He delivers a story with breathtaking ingenuity.”

Riley Hanick is an essayist, journalist, and translator whose writing has appeared in The Sonora Review, Seneca Review, No Depression, eyeshot, and Labor World. His work has received support from the Jentel and McKnight foundations and he has served as a writer-in-residence for the University of Iowa Museum of Art. His essay ìThe Pradellesî was among the notable essays in the 2010 Best American series. He teaches at Murray State University, where he is the Watkins Chair in Creative Writing and serves as the nonfiction editor for New Madrid. His first book, Three Kinds of Motion, was published by Sarabande Books in 2015.