Lauren Haldeman

Team Photograph Lauren Haldeman

Team Photograph unfurls like a dream half-remembered: snatches of surreal vulnerability punctured by lyric ruminations. This speaker's voice is curious, lonely, mournful, haunted, and strangely funny, all sinew and nerve endings, the opposite of bones--deeply interested in ghosts, and what they might want. This speaker knows the present is just a piece of threadbare cloth draped over the world, rubbed thin by time and longing, its gaps exposing all the histories we aren't done with, all the histories that aren't done with us.
--Leslie Jamison, author of the NYT bestseller The Empathy Exams

In her extraordinary graphic novel--which masterfully incorporates poetry and elements of memoir--Lauren Haldeman layers the warfare of soccer over the battlefields now called Bull Run Regional Park, where, growing up, her soccer team would practice and compete. The park and surrounding town of Fairfax Station Virginia set the landscape for the book, where the narrator regularly encounters spectral visions of wounded soldiers and very real artifacts of war-- "wounded wraiths and faceless shapes" float in her hallway at night, and bullet shells, buttons, and human bones surface around the soccer fields in daylight. The narrator turns to poetry and history to make sense of the town and its bloodshed, of its forever attachment to injustice and its inability to restore erased identities. Team Photograph is a journey from research to illumination, and the result is a tender yet powerful reckoning of time and place, proof that the past and the present are inexorably fused together.