Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies 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.

With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.
1139889968
Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies 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.

With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.
19.95 In Stock
Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

by Suzanne Roberts
Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

by Suzanne Roberts

eBook

$19.95 

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Overview

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies 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.

With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781496231871
Publisher: Nebraska
Publication date: 03/01/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 252
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska, 2020), Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), and four collections of poetry. Visit her website: suzanneroberts.net.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Death

The Essay Determines How It Will Begin
The Grief Scale
Eight Hours
The Same Story
Becoming Bird
A Kiss for the Dying
Bone & Skin
Wearing Her Eye Shadow
A Love Letter to My Hometown after the Shooting
The Red Canoe
Traveling with Ghosts
Friending the Dead

Desire

Keep Your Numbers Down
In Love with the World
Sportfucking
This Far from Desire
Traveling Alone
Winter Travel
The Hungry Bride
Breaking the Codes
My Mother’s Daughter
Funerals, Safety Pins, and Flaming Saddles
The Good-Time Girl
What She Must Do

Other Difficulties

Animal Bodies
The Queen of the Amazon
A True Story about Jealousy
The Last Goodbye
Rites of Passage
Traveling with the Dead
The Disappearing Act
Honky-Tonk Woman
Auntie Suzanne
The Danger Scale
Words Etched into Skin
Mother Keeps Daddy on the Shelf
Ways to Speak the Unspeakable
Dreaming in the Time of Wildfire

Acknowledgments
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