{"product_id":"animal-bodies-9781496231024","title":"Animal Bodies","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLonglisted for the 2023 PEN\/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay\u003cbr\u003e Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e How do we reckon with our losses? In \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of w\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Personal and heart wrenching, the essays of \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e concern control and surrender.”—Dontaná Mcpherson-Joseph, \u003ci\u003eForeword Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e] is beautifully observed and realized, heartfelt and informed, self-deprecating, and often wryly witty. These essays explore how the bodies we inhabit bring pleasure and shame. How the planet which hosts us is beautiful and terrible. How sometimes we cherish it, and sometimes we treat it as carelessly as we would a disdainful ex. How grief is the residue of love.”—Elizabeth Bales Frank, \u003ci\u003eBrevity\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Fierce, bright, and connected to this moment in time, Roberts's \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e will remain with the reader for the way it channels clarity amid despair.\"—Jennifer Sinor, \u003ci\u003eWestern American Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In the essay 'Rights of Passage,' Roberts writes, 'The parts of our bodies that betray our animal natures and remind us of our animal bodies . . . are off-limit topics in polite conversation. We deny the most natural parts of ourselves—our hunger or desires, our vulnerabilities and frailties, and even our grief.' \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is both a response and a remedy to that denial, an example of how to behold with tenderness the parts of ourselves we are most inclined to hide.\"—Lucy Bryan, \u003ci\u003ePrairie Schooner\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"For readers who have experienced grief—and that's all of us—\u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e by Suzanne Roberts will resonate. Readers will not have had all of the same experiences as the author, but we certainly have felt the same sorts of confusion and pain, and this connection, this bond between reader and writer can make us all feel less alone in our own grief.\"—Pam Anderson, \u003ci\u003ePortland Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is a fierce accomplishment, full of varied formal experiments with the essay yet dedicated to precise readable prose. It is a book to take on an airplane, to bring on long travels, to leave in some exotic place for the next traveler. Though you may not want to leave it, due to the circumstances, you are forced to travel light, and you feel its void in your pack, even though you have picked up another book to read on the way home.\"—\u003ci\u003eHeavy Feather Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"How do we grieve? How do we look at the most shameful parts of ourselves? How do we reconcile with our contradictory nature? In \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies: Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties\u003c\/i\u003e, Suzanne Roberts's newest book of lyrical, poignant, and daring essays, the author takes us into the trenches.\"—Vilune Sestokaite, terrain.org\u003cbr\u003e“In \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e, Suzanne Roberts offers surprising insight, both intimate and universal, into death, desire, and how we all move through this difficult world. Her essays are ruthless, beautiful, graceful, and endlessly fascinating. A wonderful book.”—Dinty W. Moore, author of \u003ci\u003eBetween Panic and Desire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Suzanne Roberts’s essays are eloquent and vibrantly imaginative. They are lyrical in the best sense: the language is rhythmic, pulsing on the page, but never poeticized, flowery, or vague. Roberts’s wisdom and humor are evident throughout. I so welcome a collection of her essays, all in one place.”—Carolyn Forché, author of \u003ci\u003eWhat You Have Heard Is True\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No one travels the depths of place and experience more phenomenally than Suzanne Roberts. In these essays that explore being, beauty, desire, death, and our collective animal journeys on the planet, \u003ci\u003eAnimal Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e gathers our questions about life and brings them to the only place where meaning might emerge: adaptation. This book is a triumph that transcends humans and gives us a chance to re-story ourselves into the larger world.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Chronology of Water\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAuthor’s Note\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Death\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Essay Determines How It Will Begin\u003cbr\u003e The Grief Scale\u003cbr\u003e Eight Hours\u003cbr\u003e The Same Story\u003cbr\u003e Becoming Bird\u003cbr\u003e A Kiss for the Dying\u003cbr\u003e Bone \u0026amp; Skin\u003cbr\u003e Wearing Her Eye Shadow\u003cbr\u003e A Love Letter to My Hometown after the Shooting\u003cbr\u003e The Red Canoe\u003cbr\u003e Traveling with Ghosts\u003cbr\u003e Friending the Dead\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Desire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Keep Your Numbers Down\u003cbr\u003e In Love with the World\u003cbr\u003e Sportfucking\u003cbr\u003e This Far from Desire\u003cbr\u003e Traveling Alone\u003cbr\u003e Winter Travel\u003cbr\u003e The Hungry Bride\u003cbr\u003e Breaking the Codes\u003cbr\u003e My Mother’s Daughter\u003cbr\u003e Funerals, Safety Pins, and Flaming Saddles\u003cbr\u003e The Good-Time Girl\u003cbr\u003e What She Must Do\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Other Difficulties\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Animal Bodies\u003cbr\u003e The Queen of the Amazon\u003cbr\u003e A True Story about Jealousy\u003cbr\u003e The Last Goodbye\u003cbr\u003e Rites of Passage\u003cbr\u003e Traveling with the Dead\u003cbr\u003e The Disappearing Act\u003cbr\u003e Honky-Tonk Woman\u003cbr\u003e Auntie Suzanne\u003cbr\u003e The Danger Scale\u003cbr\u003e Words Etched into Skin\u003cbr\u003e Mother Keeps Daddy on the Shelf\u003cbr\u003e Ways to Speak the Unspeakable\u003cbr\u003e Dreaming in the Time of Wildfire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments","brand":"University of Nebraska Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49409240465751,"sku":"9781496231024","price":15.19,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781496231024.jpg?v=1730506102","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/animal-bodies-9781496231024","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}