Casting Deep Shade
“Composed of snippets of prose on ecological histories, historical narratives, folklore, etymologies, personal asides, travel memoir, cultural commentary, and moving family autobiography, the book begins as a loving naturalist’s ode to the beech tree and branches out to touch a dizzying array of international, transhistorical topics, not least among them what it means to be alive.”
—Publishers Weekly
I love the double resonance of the title of this posthumous collection from the beloved C.D. Wright because it so aptly skewers the mutability of language as it is used over and over by humans to try to make sense of the stubbornly material physical world, of which, I think, Wright would have approved. This new work promises to be all about the beech tree, which Wright studied for years before her sudden death in 2016. Wright’s prose-poetry style has always resisted categorization, and simply blown apart convention; An Amble will surely serve as a conservation not just of nature but of Wright’s indelible voice, which is sorely missed.
—Bridget Read for Vogue
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