Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

by Linda Hogan

Overview

Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan explores her lifelong love of the living world and all its inhabitants.

"We want to live as if there is no other place," Hogan tells us, "as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life." In offering praise to sky, earth, water, and animals, she calls us to witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. In Dwellings, Hogan takes us on a spiritual quest borne out of the deep past and offers a more hopeful future as she seeks new visions and lights ancient fires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393322477
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	336,556
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Linda Hogan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Mean Spirit. Her other honors include an American Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.

Editorial Reviews

Novelist (Mean Spirit) and poet (Seeing Through the Sun) Hogan branches into nonfiction with this slender volume of meditations on the natural world. She successfully couples a poet's appreciation of phrasing and rhythm with Native American sensibilities and stories. Throughout, Hogan exquisitely examines both natural and internal landscapes. She writes beautifully about animals without anthropomorphizing them and, in so doing, explores what it means to be human. Herself a Chickasaw, Hogan is able to bring a diverse cultural perspective to her analysis of how people relate to nature. She concludes, ``We must wonder what of value can ever be spoken from lives that are lived outside of life, without a love or respect for the land and other lives.'' Although 11 of the 16 essays have been previously published, they come together to form an invigorating whole. Author tour. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Dwellings is Chickasaw Indian poet and novelist Hogan's (The Book of Medicines, LJ 7/93) first book of nonfiction. In this collection of short essays, many previously published in literary journals, she describes various aspects of nature and problems she perceives in current attitudes toward it. Hogan's lyrical writing style draws us into her experiences in Central America, her Chickasaw homeland, and her current home in Colorado, showing us portraits of the natural world in each spot. Her strong orientation toward the environment shines through in each section, as she encourages her readers to see themselves as a small part of the whole that is our ecosystem. The pieces come together to reflect the author's profound respect for the earth and prompt us to feel the same. For literary and ecology collections.-Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces

Library Journal