RaveSouthern Humanities ReviewThrough these warm and heartfelt essays, Renkl shows us how to keep on loving this complicated place, how to look right at its \'appalling truths\' and gesture, still, toward hope ... The resulting collection of essays is stitched together like a patchwork quilt—an art form close to Renkl and passed down from her maternal ancestors ... In her effort to uncover those intricacies, a through-line emerges across the book’s six sections: Renkl’s commitment to bearing witness—to the landscape, the people, the struggle around her. She calls her readers into this role, too ... Renkl understands the important role that looking plays as a potential first step toward change, the need to allow as many people as possible to see. Here’s hoping we continue to look with her ... Renkl maintains a posture of hope and a belief in people such as those in that Hermitage neighborhood. It’s a hope that’s contagious ... There, especially, is how this collection shines—in Renkl’s ability to write with warm affection for the people and landscapes of her homeland and also look behind the curtain at the darker truths.
Margaret Renkl
RaveSouthern Humanities Review...warmly invites its readers to see the world as Renkl does: in reverent wonder and awe of the natural world, understanding that humanity is connected to nature while at the same time audience to its spectacle. These essays teach us to revel in our smallness ... In this collection, Renkl artfully weaves the personal and familial together with the natural and ecological ... All throughout, Renkl writes these beautiful, though haunting, articulations of grief as she’s experienced it and observed it in the world around her ... Herein lies another important gift of these pages—the remarkable ability to look at moments that might seem quotidian and to find, instead, something almost miraculous ... This is a book to linger with. It begs to be felt.
