In concise and distilled prose, Lemus presents a collection of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of a challenging year that threatened all she loved most.
Particulate Matter is the story of a year when the world turned upside down. Set in Los Angeles, it’s about love and crisis, loss and grief, the city and the ocean, ancestral ghosts and history haunting. Nature herself seemed to howl. Fires raged and covered the house Lemus and her spouse shared in ash. It was a challenging and terrifying time, and yet the sublime beauty of the everyday shone through with particular power and presence.
“A love story that’s profoundly rooted in the emotional, geographical, and sociopolitical terrain of today. Like song lyrics or snapshots, [Lemus’] wisps and fragments of language take on a coded and otherworldly atmosphere, one that conveys wonder and dread almost subliminally.”
—NPR
“There are only a few words per page in Particulate Matter, but that doesn’t actually matter. The words Felicia Luna Lemus does carefully choose serve to paint a brilliant picture of her marriage, of a Los Angeles covered in ash, of dashed hopes and new beginnings.”
—Good Morning America
“A tiny, powerful flame of a book. Lemus’ writing lands like sparks and ash, fragmented and tinged with grief. Particulate Matter is an exploration of the simultaneity of delight, yearning, grief and confusion of being in love with a person and a place. Of being alive at all.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“…exquisitely crafted….gorgeous…deeply penetrating and philosophical.”
—Chicago Review of Books & Yale Climate Connections
“Lemus bears an unmatched precision of the craft. This succinct mic drop of a personal story begs to be read over and over again.”
—Booklist
(Akashic Books, 2020)