Amy Leach grew up in Texas, where she graduated with a BA from Southwestern Adventist College in 2000. Since receiving her M.F.A. in nonfiction creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2005, her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and reviews, including The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion Magazine, A Public Space, and Los Angeles Review. She has been recognized with the Whiting Writers' Award (2010), a Best American Essays honor (2009), a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award (2008), and a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Amy Leach lives in Montana.
"Sheer scrambling delight." --Lawrence Weschler "One of the most
exciting and original writers in America." --Yiyun Li "Loopy,
mad-hatterish, infernally addictive writing that makes you sneeze."
--David Abram "You need this book." --Seth Marko, UCSD Bookstore "I
haven't seen such imagination and magical use of language in nature
writing since I first read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek." --Dale Szczeblowski, Porter Square Books "If you love words
and the natural world, Amy Leach will lead you through the world
with new eyes." --Jeanne Costello, Maria's Bookshop "Sparkling,
priceless." --Stacie Williams, Boswell Book Company "This is just
the book to tuck into a backpack for a thoughtful read under open
skies, or for curling up with while sitting on the deck."
--Kristine Kaufman, Snow Goose Bookstore "Words of wisdom....Ms.
Leach humanizes and elevates." --NYT.com "[Leach] amuses, and
amazes." --The Guardian "A rarity." --Financial Times "Magical."
--Washington Independent Review of Books "My new favorite author."
--St. Paul Pioneer Press "Beautiful, graceful essays.... It's
science made into poetry." --Missoula Independent "Reminiscent of
Diane Ackerman's [essays], with a bit more fizz." --Minneapolis
StarTribune "Whimsical and enchanting." --New Letters "Leach's
expositions take on a mythic tone likened to a fairy tale or a
bedtime story." --Chicagoist.com "This is a bonbon of a book."
--Kirkus "Verbal delight." --Publishers Weekly "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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