A Thing of Beauty

At one point in Susannah M. Smith’s The Alchemy of Paradise, the narrator follows her father’s ghostly footsteps to Venice, the city where he drowned several years earlier. She sits at a writing desk in an apartment overlooking a canal, gazing at the “ribbons of light” on the water. Her reverie transports her to the last breath he took, the last time his heart beat. She picks up a pen and, in an attempt to speak with him, begins “a written thought experiment.”

What is my purpose on this earth?To open beauty circuits.

His succinct reply could be the explanation for the book as a whole. The Alchemy of Paradise fits into no genre. It is an essay written in poems masquerading as a novel. It is a consolation for loss and an invitation to the reader to fill in the gaps with their own thoughts and energies. It is a collection of found objects, ideas, quotations. Its form is confusing...