Carousel: An Essay on Seeing – From Yale University Press, July 2026

Carousel: An Essay on Seeing by Sarah Minor

Forthcoming July 21st 2026

This book-length essay borrows the form of a lecture to tell the story of the panorama from ancient tapestries to contemporary digital imaging, tracing panoramic narrative forms to explore the shifting human experience of “seeing-all” across time.

When Carousel: An Essay on Seeing opens, a professor has just begun delivering a slide lecture to a darkened classroom:

"It's the audience that allows a performance to begin. Every limit is a set of controls. Who is speaking? Not 'I' anymore, an angle without audience, but a marionette, a woman elsewhere, everywhere else, everywhere strung into a frame."

Across short, immersive sections masterfully fusing the slide lecture and the essay, Minor invites us to see across time as a professor-narrator tying the Bayeux Tapestry to surrealist paintings, Instagram reels, and drone warfare. Blending art history with memoir, close looking with confession, Carousel considers how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates contemporary viewers and subjects. In language that captures the disorientation of the whirling ride, Minor shows us how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.

Dr. Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of two previous books, Bright Archive and Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, as well as the chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated. Minor is Assistant Professor of Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.

https://www.sarahceniaminor.com/carousel

Summer and Fall 2026 Readings & Events​

• July 21st - Book Launch + Conversation with Melissa Febos, Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City
• July 23rd - Reading + Conversation with Jordan Kisner, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn 
• July 25th - Reading + Conversation with Zach Savich, Mac's Backs, Cleveland
• Sept 18th - Reading with Elissa Washuta, University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson
• September 23 + 24th - Reading and Presentation at the 35th International Panorama Council Conference, Konstance, Germany 
• November 3rd - Reading at Suquehanna University, Sellinsgrove
• November 13th - Reading with Tisa Bryant for Book Matters, Iowa City