In the mundane act of picking up her child, Suzanne Berger incurs a severe back injury that leaves her suddenly and dramatically disabled. Because the muscles for sitting are torn and using a wheelchair for any length of time is impossible, she finds herself literally horizontal. In this dazzling memoir, Berger charts her course from this almost completely horizontal existence to partial mobility and finally to tentative uprightness and walking. With vigor, insight, and black humor, Berger portrays the phantasmagoric universe caused by her unusual physical placement in the world. She captures the emotional vicissitudes of confinement and chronic pain, seismic changes in personal relationships, mind/body unity and disparity, and greatly modified parenthood in a series of mesmerizing stories about everything from blissful aquatherapy sessions in a rehabilitation hospital to raging tirades addressed to Mr. Rogers from the TV room floor. In the tradition of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Poet Suzanne E. Berger's life was dramatically and horrifyingly changed when she bent to pick up her child and something at the base of her spine tore so out of joint that she collapsed "like a puppet unstrung." The problem was never clearly pinned down, but Berger was: she spent the next six years flat on her back until she was finally able to move and sit by herself. This is the anguished story of her plight, of the torments and conflicted feelings she bore, and of her concerns for her child and family. In this chronicle she successfully communicates the pain--physical and emotional--that she faced as a "horizonatal woman." Berger, a poet and writer of nonfiction, sustained a severe back injury while lifting her child. She was unable to sit, stand, or walk for several years?hence the title. Here she writes of the unusual perspective she developed on the world: chopping vegetables while lying on the floor and watching her child's school play from a mat near the stage. She describes chronic pain; feelings of anger, guilt, and inadequacy at being unable to participate fully as a wife and mother; the slow rehabilitation process; and her eventual return to mobility. Although intensely personal and very well written, this book is less compelling than Lois Keith's What Happened to You? Writings by Disabled Women (New, 1996). An optional purchase.?Barbara M. Bibel, Oakland P.L., Cal. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. One ordinary autumn day, Suzanne Berger bent down to pick up her toddler and couldn't get up again. Without warning, something in her lower back had torn, and her life would never be the same. Berger, a prizewinning poet and nonfiction writer, has compiled 28 short but powerful essays into a travelogue of her nine-year journey into the world of disability and back again. Because her injury made sitting painful and walking nearly impossible, she spent the better part of seven years lying down--on the floor, the backseat of the family car, a portable lawn chair while teaching university classes. In stream-of-consciousness fashion, she relates her struggle to stay connected with "normal" society while sinking into bitterness and despair (told by a meditation instructor to pick a two-syllable mantra, she selects the f -word and you ). Fiercely personal and yet touching a universal chord, this book will be prized by disabled readers for its eloquence and by the people who care about them for its honesty. June Vigor A woman with a temporary but grievous disability reveals with bitterness, insight, and humor what it is to be immobile and horizontal in a world of the mobile and vertical. This first book of nonfiction by Berger, an award-winning poet (These Rooms and Legacies, not reviewed), is filled with the vivid images one expects from a writer with a poet's eye. While in the prime of life she suffered a sudden, severe injury that left her unable to sit or stand for more than brief moments. In mostly short essays on disability, personal relationships, isolation, confinement, and recovery (the piece on aquatic therapy appeared in slightly different form in the ``Hers'' column of the New York Times Magazine), she tells of her success at making Christmas cookies on the kitchen floor, of a disastrous evening at a theater that could not or would not accommodate the lawn chair she planned to recline in, of her inability to attend a family funeral, of checking into a rehabilitation hospital that she believes may be her last hope. Although she touches on various aspects of her daily existence as a disempowered woman, the central theme is her struggle to be a good mother to the daughter who was only a toddler when disaster struck. She shares her fears about not being able to protect her child from harm, her feelings when she is left behind on father-daughter outings, her joy at finally being able to take her daughter on a simple shopping trip. In the final chapters, ten years have passed and Berger is once again vert