Missing Pieces: A Coroner’s Companion
Seattle in the Thirties and Forties was a sometimes seedy, often melancholy place, full of toil (if you were lucky enough to be working), human tragedy and blue-collar boredom. Leo Lassen’s night baseball broadcasts were the city’s most popular entertainment. Crime was commonplace. Frequently it fell to deputies in what today is called the Medical Examiner’s Office to reconstruct the facts about those with shattered bodies and fractured lives.
Reviews
Kathryn Rantala has retrieved those images from Seattle's past in Missing Pieces, a fusion of poetry and prose given added strength by a collection of photographs from the King County Medical Examiner's archives. The photos are not morbid, but instead add texture to Rantala's non-conventional poems and poignant essays about Seattle before it became the glossily nick-named Emerald City. Rantala's work is at once artfully complex and devastatingly true. Rantala grew up in Seattle and knows whatshe is writing about.
—Herb Robinson, novelist
In Missing Pieces Ms. Rantala has produced a work that is compelling in its images and hauntingly beautiful in its often complex search for the reconstruction of the fragmentary. Like her poetry and prose pieces the pictures are small glimpses into a world that is alien, yet hauntingly familiar: worldly yet ethereal in its stark, black-and-white finality.
Here, indeed, is the sound of silence. Kathryn Rantala's words must be taken as vital evidence in the endless search for meaning in the absences of lives.
—Steve Sneyd, Small Press Writer of the Year
Excerpt
from "Negatives"
The dark contacts.
Against night glass,
light behind,
shapes stroll and stare.
The sun, some mornings,
comes to your window,
stands behind something,
whatever is there,
and gives it to you.
