Things That Are by Amy Leach EPUB

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Things That Are by Amy Leach EPUB

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.

"The living world has a new and sprightly champion in Leach, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. In her first collection of essays, gracefully illustrated by Nate Christopherson in the mode of Barry Moser and Rockwell Kent, Leach is nimble, precise, dynamic, witty, and metaphysical. She writes of wondrously adaptive goats, penguins enduring blizzards to protect what may well be a stone instead of an egg, and tiny warblers who travel thousands of miles. Leach discerns the pea plant’s 'yearning’ for connection as it sends out its searching tendrils and compares bamboodependent pandas to penitents. In her heady and astute approach to natural history, her disarming concoctions of science and fancy, she is part Diane Ackerman, part Margaret Atwood. Also a bluegrass musician, she writes delectably rhythmic, singing sentences. Here be dragons, water lilies, jellyfish, and spiritual quests. Leach looks to the heavens, too, considering with high imagination the forces that shape stars and galaxies. Even as she fashions a bit of bluesy satire to decry our abuse of nature, Leach is ecstatic in her knowledgeable, resplendent, and exhilarating contemplations of everything from subatomic particles to dust, Spinoza, donkeys, and caterpillars." �Booklist (STARRED REVIEW)

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