In her new memoir, Rough Beauty, the award-winning poet recounts her struggle to rebuild her life after a devastating fire left her with nothing but the opportunity to begin again ... In the opening pages, Auvinen recounts the experience from years before, the day she drove her truck up a mountain road in the Colorado Rockies, her beloved dog Elvis riding shotgun beside her. That warm glow of a fire that she spotted up ahead – it was coming from her isolated mountain cabin. Rather than cozy and inviting, this fire was destroying her life. It had ravaged her home, consumed her belongings, and obliterated all traces of her daily life ... Fighting back against the grief, Auvinen confronted her choices. With no physical remnants of her life, she realized she could easily disappear. Or, she could craft a new life. Ever the fighter, she started over. But this time, as if tempered by the fire, Auvinen surrendered to those powers beyond herself – the rhythm of nature, the change of seasons, the simple kindnesses expressed by those around her ... Hers is a voice not found often enough in literature – a woman who eschews the prescribed role outlined for her by her family and discovers her own path. Refined by the fires of her experiences, Auvinen discovers her authentic self.

What drew me to Karen Auvinen’s Rough Beauty was not interest in a change of pace from my usual reading fare. You see, Auvinen is a writer, like me. And so I selfishly figured that in reading her memoir ... The title is, without an iota of a doubt, the perfect way to describe her writing: gorgeously and carefully rendered, yet brimming with a sort of wildness that can’t be entirely tamed. This two-sidedness pervades everything in Auvinen’s life: her father, at once charming and volatile; the Colorado mountain setting, as awe-inspiring as it is perilous; her connections with others, often tense but always essential ... however some sections dragged on a little too long for my taste; whether or not that has to do with me not being accustomed to memoirs, I cannot say. For the most part, the way she splits things up keeps the book from becoming monotonous, but I can’t help but feel that Auvinen never escapes a certain repetitiveness...but her words are laced with wisdom - not the preachy kind, thankfully, but the hard-won kind that prompts you to reconsider your own surroundings as Auvinen considers hers ...

The fire ravaged Auvinen’s mountain cabin, leaving only a few charred remnants of her carefully crafted life behind. Rebuilding required her both to let go and to let others in, putting aside her hard-won independence to rely on the kindness of others in her tight-knit Colorado community.

These outstanding autobiographical essays explore solitude, traumatic events, and a deep commitment to place ... when her cabin burned down, destroying all her work in progress, she had to accept help and discovered that her small town was a true community ... After the fire’s climactic prologue, the book gracefully fills in events either side: her early years and how she rebuilt her life ... The author has served a long apprenticeship—sensing life’s patterns, becoming embedded in a human community, learning to give and receive love—and the result is a beautiful story of resilience perfect for readers of Terry Tempest Williams ... A fine example of the hybrid nature-memoir.

'In the days after I’d watched my house burn, a great weight lifted,' Auvinen writes in this beautiful, contemplative memoir. After a fire destroyed Auvinen’s Colorado Front Range Rocky Mountain home and belongings when she was nearly 40, she moved to an isolated mountain community in the same state....unburdened by a house full of goods that required care, cleaning, or mending...'I felt strangely euphoric,' she writes ... This breathtaking memoir honors the wildness of the Rockies and shows readers how they might come to rely on their animal companions.

Rough Beauty, opens on a beautiful March morning, when Auvinen, out delivering the mail on her rural Colorado route, notices the deep blue of the sky, the signs of early spring and smoke from a fire—a fire that turns out to be her own house burning...Auvinen can only watch as firefighters work to contain the fire, which destroys everything she owns ... Auvinen then drops back to detail her difficult adolescence: an abusive dad, an impassive mom, a peripatetic childhood. But she dispatches with her youth quickly, focusing instead on the years that followed the devastating fire and describing life at the edge of the wilderness.