Equal parts fiction, poetry, autobiography and myth, these distilled stories follow a girl named June in search of her own beginning. They are coming of age stories, in which sexual and romantic underpinnings force June, both waking and dreaming, to struggle with her identity as a real person as well as a scripted character. While she sometimes appears to be no more than the sound of her own name, observant and deeply aware, she is grounded in the textured inner landscape that is her entire existence. Drawing on the irrational but evocative properties of sound and rhythm, rich in imagery, these writings employ a syntax of sensation, pleasure, desire, anguish, that graphs the nerves beneath the skin.

In her small, fabled world, June's closest friends are a man who wears a monocle and a red chair that struts about and misbehaves in a way June can only dream of. There are moments in June's narratives, both for June and the reader, when the whole world drops away, and one realizes suddenly what it means to fall in some obediently human way. It is from these unfixable points that June considers herself, and all that happens, or waits in constant deferral, to happen.

without cease the earth faintly trembles:
Joining the ranks of two renowned Montreal experimental writers, Nicole Brossard and Gail Scott, Amanda Marchand succeeds in creating a bizarre yet starkly beautiful cross-genre work of art with her first book. — Montreal Review of Books

“Critics Pick”: NOW Magazine, Toronto, ON, 2003.

“Best Books Nobody Talks About: Without Cease the Earth Faintly Trembles” — writer, Zoe Whittall