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Things That Are (2012)

by Amy Leach(Favorite Author)

4.24 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1571313346 (ISBN13: 9781571313348)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Milkweed Editions

review 1: This is a beautiful little book of whimsical essays about the joys of being in a world as alive as you are. This book made me smile over and over again as I read it in the hammock in my backyard-the leaves singing, the flowers growing, the sun doing the thing that it does-and I felt, quite suddenly, how important it is to feel happy to be alive, even as it seems that the whole world is struggling. What a wonderful thing it is to be one of the things that are.
review 2: This one is a real challenge to my sensibilities, which are modern, political, and empirical. Leach is none of this, writes a site-less pre-Baconian natural history the whimsy of which is worn like a scapular over the encyclopedic display. The first paragraph of "Goats and Bygone Goats" is a pea... morecockish plume of erudition, who could make any sense of it without Wikipedia? But it's all on Wikipedia, as it just so happens. The essay's purpose is to reflect on rumination, that physical response in goats so central to her own self-understanding. Leach ruminates -- that is, in her own definition, chews more than she swallows. "Word-pictures," a young colleague of mine described Leach's tropes. That about gets it. Language's mediumistic intensities, the veil it makes before the world, Leach would fly far into. Meanwhile the naturalist never has to step outdoors. less

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