Untangled

“You will find story time with Joy Rudder to be a riotous cornucopia of friends and flowers, birds and babies, tropical trees and Caribbean culinary arts, manta rays and armadillos, soursop and pomerac—all sparkling exuberantly off the page with a warmth and brilliance to rival the Caribbean waters that surround her beloved homeland. Though there’s also a solemn gravitas undergirding the poetic profusion of Rudder’s imagery, her stories simultaneously unscramble and interweave some of the most challenging issues of our lives and our times.”


—Tim Kuepfer, English congregation pastor, Chinatown Peace Church





“Untangled is a hybrid collection of creative nonfiction and poetry held together by a common theme: longing. In re-narrating her own rich Trinidadian history, Joy Rudder discloses the impact of colonizers’ unholy longings for mammon that ravished a land and a people—longings that prove tepid alongside the deeper human desire for the One called ‘Love,’ whose voice whispers through all things to animate and redeem. Rudder has the promise of the kingdom in her voice, both in its critique and in its lyrical hope.”


—Mary McCampbell, associate professor of humanities, Lee University





“Throughout Untangled, an evocative, episodic memoir told in wide-ranging stories, Joy Rudder deftly sorts out tangles of radiant hope and realistic lament as she takes us to places as distant as vibrant Caribbean shores and a frat house in British Columbia. In prose redolent with life, the author passionately probes the Divine Presence in the everyday. More than words remembered from a page, this book lingers with me as a contemplative lens through which I am better able to see grace.”


—Susan S. Phillips, professor of Christian spirituality, New College Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union