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Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free appears to be an authentic Southern narrative told in prose and poem by Nashville performance poet Minton Sparks. As narrator, Sparks begins by inviting readers to join her and her family for a Saturday night supper, where “Sometimes a tale will sound more like a poem or a song or a speech, just depending on who rears up in my head to tell it.” Sparks’ prose here is folksy and down-home, invoking a nostalgia for a rural South where extended families broke bread together, where “Momma had to set three extra leaves into the grooves to make it big enough for all us cousins” and “the little ones will be sent down to the card tables in the den.”

The book’s final page returns us to the dining table. “There you have it,” Sparks writes, “the truth of who we are, of who I am, hung out to dry on the line of the evening’s heat.” And while Sparks tries unsuccessfully to keep her Aunt Fay from “snuffing out her cigarette in a half-eaten pile of mashed potatoes,” she thanks us for joining her and hints at a sequel: “Don’t run off, now; y’all might want to stay for dessert. I hear Momma hollering for me to help her with the coffee.”

The book’s packaging, too, mimics a kind of down-home authenticity. The back cover blurb says “The thirty pieces collected here veer from heartbreak to hilarity and back again, as Sparks shares her memories of growing up in small-town Tennessee.” Readers are positioned for, and then told they’ve experienced, a pleasant yearning for the good old days, tinged with just enough “heartbreak” to keep it real.

As anyone who has seen Sparks perform knows, this is exactly the opposite of what Minton Sparks’ best work is actually about. Her poems recall not a soft fondness for the good old days, but rather a masterful, largely unflinching portrait of violence, shame, lost opportunity, madness, longing and grief. The humor in her shows is the kind that’s so damned funny because it’s so damned sad.

More subversive than the disconnect between what the book implies it’s going to do and what it actually does, though, is the way it also questions the nature of literary reality. In addition to being exclusively neither poetry nor prose, Desperate Ransom is also a fictional memoir (a fiction that’s illustrated in the book by genuine Webb family photographs). What’s more, it’s not even exclusively a book: a bonus DVD features Sparks performing live, as well as real home movies and a section in which Sparks talks to the camera about her grandmother’s diaries. All of which begs some questions: who is who here, and what exactly is the past? Is there a danger in romanticizing memory? How do we escape our history, or come to terms with it? What is truth?

These questions are relevant to the book’s structure, and the reader of Desperate Ransom gets the sense that its author is still struggling with them herself. One clear indication of the struggle is the contrast between the prose sections and the poems. Where the poems are taut, dramatic, tense affairs, filled with the waverings and ambiguities of real life, the prose tends merely to explain the poems, and to connect them into a coherent, easily digestible narrative. In one way of looking at it, this move often undercuts the poems’ power by resolving them neatly and happily, as when the dance caller in “Dance Caller at the Grand Opening” turns out not to have died, which the poem implies, but instead: “That ole boy got a pacemaker after all the heart trouble. Must have worked pretty well, too, because he was back up at the microphone the very next year to call the Sumner County Turkey Trot.” But another possibility is that Sparks is using this kind of adjustment to mirror the way our memories adjust troubling history into stories that suit what we want to believe about ourselves.

But the prose is not always about adjusting history. Sometimes it’s just fine prose, and metaphorically dead on, especially when Sparks tones down the vernacular. In a story that foregrounds the book’s major theme—is it possible to change who I am, where I come from?—Sparks recounts her summertime ritual of “darkening my lily-white body.” The story’s ending offers not a drop of sentimental affect, and, what’s more, the scene itself handles the questions the story poses: “Scorching my skin into cooked-lobster pink around the tender edges of my green polka-dotted bathing suit left me sitting up at night, in the hotel room bathtub in a vinegar soak, my mother sloppily slapping on the Solarcaine.”

Sparks notes, in both the acknowledgments and on the DVD, that she published Desperate Ransom to satisfy her fans’ requests for a written account of her performances. For those who see Sparks as a serious artist, however—an artist exploring both cultural and personal history, and finding ways to articulate that exploration—Desperate Ransom is an investigation into identity and history. While technically categorized as fiction, the book’s deliberate blurring of the distinctions between person and persona, history and remembrance, fact and fiction, is a structural facsimile of how we make meaning, which is another way of saying how we survive. At one point in the memoir, Sparks, in the voice of herself as a child, remarks: “Suddenly I’m certain who I am and what I want are two very different things.” At its core, Desperate Ransom is a genre-defying attempt to reconcile that disconnect.