throughsmoke: an essay in notes
2020 Winner for the Firecracker Award in Nonfiction from CLMP.
2020 Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Nonfiction.
“With a particular focus on fragrances, Dubrow follows her nose into the terrain of memory, but also into the relationship of scent to grief and desire, and how these emotions might be felt, understood, and smelled.”
—Judges’ citation, Firecracker Award in Nonfiction, CLMP
There are many ways I might describe Jehanne Dubrow’s riveting new project, throughsmoke: “a capacious lyric essay that distills many voices into one” (true!), or “a stirring meditation on the olfactory sensibility’ (yes!), or even ‘a remarkable compendium of facts about perfume” (indeed!). But throughsmoke is also an elegantly braided exploration of what fragrance opens up in us—a haunting and ephemeral guide, as the finest fragrances are, to memory, obsession, grief, and desire. “Perhaps, it was inevitable that I love these things,” Dubrow’s speaker muses at one point. It seems likewise inevitable that I would love this book.
—Julie Marie Wade, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
Fragrance is nothing without the skin that bears it, the mind that weaves it into stories. We are the performers of our perfumes, and so what goes through the nose can only be expressed by an “I.” Rising in short, fragrant whiffs from the page, Jehanne Dubrow’s memories and insights on smells and smelling compose what she calls “a book of distillations.” But also the outlines of a body, corpus as well as breathing flesh. Perfume “remains always right now,” she writes; always in the present tense, always a present. As I read throughsmoke, Dubrow is here, now, with her gift: a fellow perfume lover, a sister in scent.
—Denyse Beaulieu, author of The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent
Our words for perfume are also our words for memory: intoxicating, heady, evocative, haunting. throughsmoke, Jehanne Dubrow’s book-length essay in lyrical notes, tries to uncover the mystery behind evocation and haunt, the desire that indelibly marks us. ‘We are each locations of interest. We are tripwire and spark,” she writes. This is a book about the tripwire art of perfumery, but it is also an investigation into the uses of beauty, and how we can understand the human spark to transform. “But the ordinary, natural scents of our actions may unmask us,” Dubrow writes, seeking to analyze the ways we mask, and finding a way to uncover and reveal. And what is found here is a critique of power, of life and death. Dubrow proposes a “new nomenclature”— “throughsmoke,” she calls it—in which “nothing would be dominated or made to kneel. There would only be the body asking permission to reach for the autonomous grace of fragrance.” This is, after all, a book about grace. Grace, and survival.
—James Allen Hall, author of I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well