Blurred Lines: An Essayist’s Dispatches on Slippery States of Being

Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THIN PLACESEssays From In BetweenBy Jordan Kisner “Five p. m. at the Sloppy Tuna and the Christians are party ready.

” There’s a casual absurdity in the opening sentence of the essay “Jesus Raves” in Jordan Kisner’s debut collection, “Thin Places. ” The ambience at the Sloppy Tuna, a beachfront mecca for day-drinking young capitalists in Montauk, N. Y. , on the eastern tip of Long Island, is generally as grimy as its name.

“The mixture of sweat and sand and other people’s beer,” Kisner writes, makes the “air thick with energy that is not quite joie de vivre and not quite a collective, ecstatic denial of mortality but something ineffable and in between. ” That “in between” state is the common denominator of this collection, the theme on which the 13 essays are a variation. Certainty, the book suggests, is an illusion. Real life exists in the gaps, which, in the case of “Jesus Raves,” is a mostly substance-induced gray zone between earthly and transcendent elation.

Kisner has brought us to the far reaches of both Long Island and 20-something depravity to witness “tawny,” model-looking church members luring coked-up, Wayfarer-wearing sinners toward God. Her point: If conversion can happen here, it can happen anywhere. According to a Celtic proverb, Kisner explains, “thin places” are where “the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous. ” These are not limited to the religious.

They include sexuality (Kisner’s mother “couldn’t understand why if I wasn’t going to be straight, I couldn’t just go ahead and be gay”); and an electrode “the width of angel-hair pasta” being threaded into a patient’s skull en route to the area of the brain that controls consciousness and empathy. In “Habitus” we cross a stretch of the Rio Grande as narrow as a “straight pin” that bisects the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo metropolitan area, “a city that’s American on its north side and Mexican on the south. ” Only 50 yards divides our countries in this place that is both one city and two.

“In a new-New-Journalist amalgam of reportage and memoir, Kisner tethers — more elegantly in some pieces than in others — her sociological dispatches to the realm of personal experience: her on-again-off-again relationship with God, her O.”