Close this alert
Things That Are: Essays
Current price:
$16.00
Publication Date: June 17th, 2014
Publisher:
Milkweed Editions
ISBN:
9781571313515
Pages:
208
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days
This beautifully crafted, little book is filled with weird, funny, oddly poignant, and plainly stunning vignettes about the natural world surrounding us. Leach uses words to describe animal and plant life that you swear aren't real, only to discover, to considerable glee, their veracity. There's something about the way all of her sentences come together that feels comfortable and almost euphoric. Each essay unfolds as if from the lips of an odd, old-time storyteller sitting at the edge of the firelight - you know all these things to be true, but you've just never heard them all put so eloquently.
July 2012 Indie Next List
Description
From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world.
The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D'Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own.
Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies--considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers--Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.