"Testimony to the healing power of wildness…a candid memoir that interweaves a trajectory of loss, pain, and hard–won serenity with a paean to wild horses."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Lyrical and vivid…an homage to the wildness and beauty of the West. Desert Chrome will especially appeal to those readers who love horses, dogs, ranching, and the ever–changing and at–risk earth we all inhabit. Wilder has written an unforgettable book."
—DURANGO HERALD
"Raw and courageous."
—FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
"A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemption—grounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang. The best memoirs reveal the deeply personal in order to see the larger world with renewed clarity and insight—this is one such book. As Wilder moves from heroin to horses, we see a substantive journey of recovery and strength—and ultimately, of resilience."
—LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue
"Wilder's love of horses and the land is the theme threaded through her, and her writing makes a heartsong of it all."
—LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of Verge
"For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangs—their wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome, Kathryn Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled in—kicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. They're coming for us, at last."
—AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal
"I learned so much reading Kathryn Wilder's book, Desert Chrome—about wild horses. About desert and water. About Kat. We were neighbors years ago, but the new paths along which, with smooth and stunning prose, she leads readers into the depths of her life suggest how little we know those close to us. And how huge life can be once we commit with our whole hearts to wildness."
—BROOKE WILLIAMS, author of Open Midnight
"Desert Chrome journeys through parched valleys, on wild rivers, and into deep rock canyons on a unique quest. In this authentic, hard–won account of her life, Kathryn Wilder finds the warm, true hearts she's been seeking and that deserve our humanity, healing, and a hell of a lot better future than they've been dealt. There's a quiet heroine at the center of this story, yes, pointing toward a beautiful world. It can be ours if we'll love better, lean closer, and listen to the voices, like Wilder's own, well worth heeding from birth."
—REBECCA LAWTON, author of The Oasis This Time
"'Blame it or praise it,' Virginia Woolf writes, 'there is no denying the wild horse in us.' Desert Chrome is the story of a landscape and the many ways the land sings us into being. It is the story of one of our most iconic North American species, Equus caballus, the wild horse. And, most of all, it is the story of a woman coming to know her own wildness—a wildness that is free, and sustaining, and on her own terms."
—JOE WILKINS, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers
"A powerful coming–of–age story, into the age of a woman's strongest power, when, with complete awareness of her past, she can, with might and strength, will the future before her. Wilder writes with all the love, wisdom, and courage it takes to make positive changes for the western landscape, horses, and readers."
—CMARIE FUHRMAN, author of Camped Beneath the Dam
2021-02-16
Testimony to the healing power of wildness.
Essayist Wilder makes her book debut with a candid memoir that interweaves a trajectory of loss, pain, and hard-won serenity with a paean to wild horses. Sexually abused by a family friend when she was a child, Wilder suffered severe consequences: PTSD, depression, and addiction. When she was 19, shortly after her boyfriend died suddenly, she started using heroin and soon added cocaine, pills, and alcohol. “I lied to everyone,” she writes, “hurt friends, stole from family, shot up in my mother’s bathroom.” She married and divorced, and when she lost custody of her two sons, she fell apart. “Drugs,” she admits, “kept me going as I lived without my children.” What saved her, eventually, was a connection to the power and beauty of wild mustangs. “Watching wild horses is the best medicine,” she writes, “like watching a river or the flames of a campfire burning low in the night.” Wilder evokes with feeling particular horses she has loved as well as the dry, rolling landscapes of high desert country—red rock and juniper, pinon pine and sagebrush—where she has camped, bought and sold ranches, set up a horse clinic, and accompanied a photographer friend to document the mustangs’ lives—and their plight. Wilder examines the problem of the burgeoning mustang population, resulting from the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in 1971. Because mustangs compete with cattle for land—angering ranchers—the Bureau of Land Management conducts helicopter roundups, removing herds to reservations, where they live essentially in captivity, forcibly separated from family band members. Wilder, along with other mustang advocates, instead promotes a “humane, commonsense” solution: injecting mares with PZP, which prevents pregnancy. A governmental PZP program, she argues, can ensure that mustangs “stay wild on lands they know.”
A spirited and impassioned chronicle.
