BODIES OF THE HOLOCENE (Contemporary Nonfiction) - Softcover

COKINOS, CHRISTOPHER

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612480985 ISBN 13: 9781612480985

Synopsis

In this brooding and daring collection of lyric prose set on the lush prairie of eastern Kansas, writer and naturalist Christopher Cokinos explores the dangers of falling too much in love with the outer world as a way of escaping a deeply fraught marriage. In landscapes both broken and bountiful, he considers the sustainable environment and the sustainable psyche while uncovering secrets and fears in order to find a hopeful, balanced self. Moving to the mountains of the West, Cokinos muses on the role of art itself in making a life worth living, discovering that art can move us as much as lovers and the land. This book grounds the whole of the self in nature, in time, in bodies both sexual and contemplative.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Cokinos is the author of two other books of literary nonfiction, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers and The Fallen Sky, and a poetry collection, Held as Earth. He is the winner of the Glasgow Prize, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Fine Line Prize for Lyric Prose and a Whiting Writers' Award. He lives in Tucson, where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Over the years, he has called eastern Kansas and northern Utah home.

From the Inside Flap

Cokinos turns a scientist's minute eye on the artifacts of human experience. Page by page, he lovingly and ruthlessly gazes—at stars, trees, birds, words, sex, loss, hope—until the object of his gaze yields up its tiny constituent parts. How fitting that such a project should find its voice in the form of these micro-essays, each one dense and particulated as soil, requiring from us a readerly carefulness that involves us in Cokinos's own work of close study. —Kimberly Johnson In language afire, Christopher Cokinos places the phenomenon of experience in the context of the Great Sand Dunes, darting mergansers, and self-fulfilling flowers—intensifying all these phenomena in the convergence, vivifying everything he turns his attention to. Like the “deliciously specific” song of one oriole, Bodies, of the Holocene “declares life as lived.” —Amy Leach, author of Things That Are With remarkably deft engagement of both beneath-the-skin intimate micro scales and vast macro scales, with beautiful attention to vernacular and wilderness landscapes, Cokinos has written a poetic argument for embodied experience of physical geography, for the need to understand our human selves as, quite literally, carnally connected to everything we are in touch with. While Bodies, of the Holocene is certainly a text about loss, fear, and hurt, it is also a joyful singing meditation on transformation and the potential of love, ceremony, and the redemptive powers of confession to salvage human self, to (re)connect with the multitudes that are beyond or non human. --Sarah de Leeuw

About this edition

• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1612480985
• ISBN 13: 9781612480985
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1