In her highly innovative and polished new collection of prose-poetic echoes, Karen Lazar explores the world of disability through the low-angle lens of those who apprehend the world from a seated position and with altered perceptions and capacities. This view is offered in three elegant parts: “cranial echoes”, “joburg echoes” and “cyber echoes”, which reflect the author’s own twenty year journey through a stroke, and her adaptation to the longterm after-echoes of radical human metamorphosis. The poetic echoes are an intriguing stylistic creation, which draw the reader into a subtle written and aural landscape.

The reader is firmly interpolated as a co-narrator in the narrative journey through the ingenious device of second-person narration, wherein the reader becomes the “you” who sees via a low-angle lens.

Lazar uses her own privilege as a writing stroke survivor who has not lost language, to weave a reverberating story which we should listen to, as many in South Africa cannot tell this tale.

Home is as old as one's skin but as elusive as an object seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It is this sense of a view, skewed, intangible, which echoes throughout Karen Lazar's Hemispheres. Waking in hospital after a post-operative stroke, she finds one side of her body paralysed and her world knocked out of kilter. Spatial, perceptual and subjective changes force her to view her new life in facets. The fragmented view is made apparent by means of a triptych of clusters which charts Karen's experience from Metamorphosis, through rehabilitation and adaptation. Quietly reflective, deeply lyrical, Hemispheres is concerned with returning separated parts into a whole and coming home to the self. Hemisphere will appeal to health care workers, like physiotherapists, OTs, neurologists, social workers, psychologists and others who deal with stroke patients and those who have had to deal with debilitating and incapacitating illnesses and conditions as well as anyone who has undergone a stroke, major surgery or any life changing and debilitating event which has affected the way they react to themselves and the world around them. It is a title for family and friends of stroke patients, survivors of debilitating physical changes.