CYCLETTES TREE ABRAHAM

Publication date: November 01, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-951213-62-6

Dimensions: 5.5x8

Pages: 214

Hardback $26.00

World English (ex. Canada) & Audio Rights: Unnamed Press bicycle while interning in Ethiopia for a semester. I have this. My travel journal is thin and makes no mention of one photo that I am certain was taken on this ride, timeNovember 11, 2012, at 15:39 of a grandmother holding an a spatula. My landlord had arranged for a local teen with me around Lake Tana and the Blue Nile. I remem trees leading to Emperor Haile Selassie's palace where stopped to inform me that here is where it all began. I had many times, that Ethiopia is the birthplace of humanity and (this is not entirely true, but also not false). But he meant where the Nile began. I had stupidly assumed, like the world north to south, that Lake Tana would have been fed by Nile and not the other way around. It made everything down. No photos could be taken after this realization. inherently skew toward cartographers, what they know of what they deem important. This puny outline of reality is GPS technology, which centers the map on the individual’s destination, eliminating chance wandering, loss of time or this is modern society’s ethos: egocentricity and efficiency from the professional to the metaphysical. I am cultur predisposed to orientate. But I deviate. I prefer medieval mappae their unknown spaces with the wondrous, outlandish, imaginary. I am a pilgrim not yet settled on her sacred place(s).

Some people “live to ride,” while others simply ride to live. In Cyclettes, author and designer Tree Abraham documents a meaningful life discovered and sustained through a two-wheeled lifestyle.

For Abraham, Cyclettes began as a list of every bicycle she has ever known—from her first childhood bike to the second-hand purchases and loaners that have propelled her into adulthood and around the world. The list grew to include other forms of both literal and conceptual cycling, spanning histories and cultures, all encircled by brief memories and observations from an author compelled to move.

Each vignette in this book is a “cyclette”— a circumvoluting entry point to Abraham’s varied illustrations and reflections. From “bicycle brain” to the gyroscopic effect, wild rides in Old Delhi to a tofu farm in Nova Scotia, exhilarating climbs and disappointing descents, Abraham makes connections to our habits and habitats regardless of how often we ride a bike. In the face of economic, environmental, technological, and philosophical shifts, and at a time when the very notion of how to live has come into question, Cyclettes offers another kind of freedom: one that finds stillness in motion.

Praise for Cyclettes

“Cyclettes is a beautifully curated collection of prose and visuals. Abraham finds a way to blend tender childhood nostalgia with insightful, even hard-to-swallow, observations, highlighted against the backdrop of her cycling adventures and trials. Spliced between coming-of-age anecdotes and musings, are bits of educational history around bikes that make this book a truly unique read.”

—Hana Shafi, author of Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty

“I love books like Cyclettes, where text and image—drawings, charts, maps, collages, photographs, and all sorts of other visual artifacts—intermingle equally, each in service of and scaffolding the other. Then add in some great thinking about the bicycle, a technology through which the self is freed or found, and you have in front of you a book that’s going to make you want to make books of your own, and probably also go for a ride, then make more books.”

—Ander Monson, author of Letter to a Future Lover and The Gnome Stories

Tree Abraham is an Ottawa-born, Brooklyn-based writer, art director, and book designer. Her authorship experiments with fragmented essay and mixed media visuals. Cyclettes is her first book.