From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth.
Raising two children, coping with pandemic isolation, and grappling with the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. Wedding of the Foxes creates a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully varied range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer, and she writes letters to Japanese women writers whose work has taught her new ways of being. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”
Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.
PRAISE
The great wisdom of Katherine Larson‘s work comes, I think, in equal parts from her relationship with nature, with time, and from that, self. Her curiosity and ability to range wide as well as deep recalls the writing of Annie Dillard and Rebecca Solnit, among others. Writing is brilliant tonic even amidst the flames. Especially amidst the flames. I’m grateful for it.
-Rick Bass, author of With Every Great Breath
I have never read a book quite like Wedding of the Foxes. Lyric, gritty, vulnerable, tender, formally smart, powerfully quiet, the book finds in twilight and shadow depths of nuanced feeling and reflection. Poet and biologist Katherine Larson finds herself in this “age of grief and extinction” building a home for herself inside Japanese literature. Among her inspirations are Tanazaki and Godzilla, along with Bachelard, Ponge, and Sontag. But fear not, there is no theoretical posturing here. Her connections to these authors, frequently rendered in letters, feel intimate, as if she were in conversation with dear friends. Her letter to Ōta Yoko, a woman who survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and shaped the literature of that disaster, is an exercise of love and admiration. The reader feels how deeply Americans are bonded to the Japanese people through the violence we inflicted upon them. It all adds up to an exploration in “the practice of repair”—of a teapot, a self, a culture. “The pandemic,” she writes, “led to different ways of seeing and listening.” Not wanting either numbness or escape, she turns to facing the scars that mark the psyche, the monsters within, and the balm of nature. This is a brilliant book and one to treasure in a time of extremity.
-Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower
“In this exquisite essay collection, Katherine Larson connects to her subjects in a manner that is fresh and daring. Whether they be Japanese women writers or species on the verge of extinction, she doesn’t just admire them from a distance as the ‘other.’ She wants to give back to those other lives by evoking their particular presences, showing how each altered her and intertwining their stories with her own life narrative. You must read this book. It will change how you see, how you love.”
-Miho Nonaka, author of The Museum of Small Bones