Limber

by Angela Pelster

Overview

"What a strange and unexpected treasure chest this is, filled with all manner of quirky revelations, all about the mundane sublime and the ineffable extraordinary. Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, through, is the haunting perfection, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, of the writing itself. Who is this Angela Pelster and where has she been all our lives?"-Lawrence Weschler

Angela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the "Loneliest Tree in the World" once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we've inherited.

Angela Pelster's essays have appeared in Granta, the Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, the Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children's novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children's Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program and lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936747757
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	909,276
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Angela Pelster’s essays have appeared in Granta, The Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, The Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children’s novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and lives with her family in Baltimore where teaches at Towson University.

Table of Contents

Les Oiseaux
By Way of Beginning
Burmis
Ethan Lockwood
Meditations on a Tree Frog
The Boys of Karachay Lake
Temple
Portrait of a Mango
Saskatoons
Inheritance
Moon Trees
Rot
Inosculation
Artifacts
How Trees Came to Be
Living in the Trees
Cardinal

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2013
Pelster's essay collection, her second book after the children's novel, The Curious Adventures of India Sophia, proves nimble and curious, with essays on subjects such as: trees, mortality, decay, and history. Whether Pelster is talking about an old mining town buried alive, a tree that belonged only to itself, or a mother buried with her children in the desert, her prose invites the reader to pause and wonder. Some essays, such as "By Way of the Beginning," "Temple," and "Rot," combine moments both mundane and sublime: the memory of beliefs we wish we'd never had, raking leaves, and caterpillars in the summer. Pelster questions our mortality, how we define ourselves, and faith; and has fun doing so. Though the collection contains hits and misses, the highlight, "How Trees Came to Be in the World," feels like an atom's-eye view of evolution. The book is sure to appeal to those who are interested in nature writing and, with its mystical feel—"chart the world's history through its trees"—to fans of creative nonfiction as well. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Recipient of 2021 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers Loft Award for Creative Prose
The Rumpus, "What to Read When Nature Calls"
Inside Hook, “The 20 Best Nature Books of the 2000s”



“Pelster’s essay collection . . . proves nimble and curious, with essays on subjects such as: trees, mortality, decay, and history. Whether Pelster is talking about an old mining town buried alive, a tree that belonged only to itself, or a mother buried with her children in the desert, her prose invites the reader to pause and wonder. Some essays, such as “By Way of the Beginning,” “Temple,” and “Rot,” combine moments both mundane and sublime: the memory of beliefs we wish we’d never had, raking leaves, and caterpillars in the summer. Pelster questions our mortality, how we define ourselves, and faith; and has fun doing so. . . . The book is sure to appeal to those who are interested in nature writing and, with its mystical feel—”chart[ing] the world’s history through its trees”—to fans of creative nonfiction as well.”
—Publishers Weekly

"This is a collection of wild and imaginative lyric essays devoted to trees and all their wonderment. Each essay is its own unique treasure, masterfully crafted with sentences that woo us and move us and knock us right off the couch. . . . Limber expanded what I thought was possible within the form of the essay, and I am so grateful for it."
—"What to Read When Nature Calls," The Rumpus

"When confronting nature, some writers focus on wildlife or entire ecosystems. For Angela Pelster, the focal point of her book Limber ended up being trees. And while this book is relatively slim, it does the weightiness of its subject justice."
—“The 20 Best Nature Books of the 2000s,” Inside Hook

“As the author reveals in these charming essays, nature is imbued with enticing mysteries, and trees can be agents of salvation.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Pelster offers up 17 beautiful and varied pieces that reawaken the reader’s sense of trees as both corporeal and symbolic objects. . . . Pelster reveals herself to be a sharp observer with an expansive imagination and an exquisite writer.”
—The Cedar Rapids Gazette

“[Limber] is one of the quirkiest and most original books about the natural world that I have read in quite some time. . . . Filled with precise, poetical and sparse language, the essays reveal not just the life of trees but how they connect us to the greater world around us.”
—Seattle Times

“Pelster takes the title of her ruminative essay collection from the book’s second essay, “Burmis,” where she discusses limber pine trees. . . . Her essays, ostensibly often about the natural world, demonstrate a similar quality in the way Pelster maneuvers her discussion of trees and animals to dark places of experience.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Like the roots of the trees Angela Pelster writes about—which at the time of their development “were an uncontainable force that drilled and crumbled the rock of the world”—these poetic essays on trees, humans and their interactions with nature are profound and beautiful.”
—Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2014-01-12
In this debut collection of essays, trees evoke lyrical reflections on the intimacies among humans, plants and animals. Pelster (Creative Writing/Towson Univ.) takes her title from the Burmis tree, a limber pine that grows in her native Alberta, Canada. "Limber pines," she writes, "are named for the ways they bend in the harsh winds and grow in curves around it; they slither their roots along rock faces until they find cracks they can slip into and drink from." The tree's ingenious capacity for survival and its eventual death after 600 years occasions an essay on the 10,000-year history of its habitat. Observing tree frogs leads Pelster to think about the connection of language to experience. The word "frog," she notes, comes from the Latin meaning "to jump." She wonders "how it was decided that the jump was the trait to name this animal after and not the croak" or "the bulgy eyed-ness." "Language," she says, "sprouts legs like a tadpole and morphs meanings without a trace of the old in the new." In "Portrait of a Mango," the author considers not only the fruit's characteristics, but also the legends surrounding it. The pigment Indian Yellow, a favorite of Vermeer, for example, supposedly was made from the urine of cows fed only mango leaves and water. The cows died young of malnutrition, and the production of Indian Yellow was banned. In "How Trees Came to Be in the World," Pelster traces life from the Big Bang to the advent of trees on the planet. Primal organisms, she writes, "worked together to become complex cells….How they imagined themselves into a thing that had previously not existed is a mystery, but there it is." Once a student at a Bible college, Pelster decided that faith "is not the domain of religion alone." As the author reveals in these charming essays, nature is imbued with enticing mysteries, and trees can be agents of salvation.

Kirkus Reviews