Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays
How do we reckon with our losses? In
Animal Bodies Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame--our taboo desires and our grief. In landscapes as diverse as Salamanca's cobbled streets, the Mekong River's floating markets, Fire Island's windswept beaches, Nashville's honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada's snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown and environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest.
With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.
Author: Suzanne Roberts
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 03/01/2022
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.6lbs
Size: 8.50h x 8.40w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781496231024
Award: 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Bronze Medal Winner - Essays
Review Citation(s): Foreword 02/27/2022
About the AuthorSuzanne Roberts is the author of
Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska, 2020),
Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), and four collections of poetry. Visit her website: suzanneroberts.net.