From Out My Heart

A darkly sensuous novel about two women whose bodies become the threshold through which the living and the dead insist on speaking, from the award-winning author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days

When Phyllipa, a scholar chasing the lingering pulse of Edgar Allan Poe, hears of Lana, a woman living in an isolated and river-ruled religious community, who claims to be visited by the spirit of Poe’s first cousin and wife, Virginia Clemm, she travels to the remote village to meet her.

Drawn into Lana’s orbit, whose faith and old wounds make her strangely open to visitation, Phyl begins to record her possessions. Soon, the boundaries between scholarly pursuit and dark desire, between inquiry and complicity, begin to dissolve, in this dark mystery set in a world of heat storms, thickets and the wet dark of the woods. 

Rainsford crafts a gothic of flesh, motherhood and inheritance, where possession is not a metaphor but a physical event: a tremor in the voice, a shift in the hips, a borrowed breath. Spectral longing presses against the skin in this novel of a haunting in its truest sense: the way another life can move through a woman’s body, and the way a woman can become the echo chamber for what history refuses to release.