Xylotheque: Essays

by Yelizaveta P. Renfro

Overview

Trees are guiding symbols for Yelizaveta P. Renfro in her life and in her work. Combining memoir and nature writing, this book comprises nine essays that represent different seasons and slices of time, not unlike the rings of a tree. No two rings are alike, but each accretes to the next, creating, section by section, a life.

"In these profound and moving essays, Yelizaveta Renfro applies a scientist's eye for detail and a reporter's investigative prowess to the essential questions of our nature, human and otherwise. Her personal and botanical inquiries into the themes of growth, death, and time evoke Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey."—Justin St. Germain, author Son of a Gun: A Memoir

"A book of raw power and unflinching wisdom, the kind that cannot be relegated to any particular time or period but which seems to speak out of eternity itself. Like Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, it dares to look without blinking at humanity's peculiar and brief place on this earth, and does so with integrity and poetical insight."—Robert Vivian, author of The Least Cricket of Evening

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826354587
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Yelizaveta P. Renfro is also the author of the award-winning book of linked short stories A Catalogue of Everything in the World. She lives in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Living at Tree Line 1

Soviet Trees 11

Cause of Death 35

Lithodendron 45

Translation: Perevod 59

Quercus 85

Mulberry 103

Navel Country 107

Song of the Redwood Tree 137

Acknowledgments 153

Editorial Reviews

"Renfro is a master of what we've come to call the lyric essay: nonfiction pieces that find their voice in the borderland between prose and poetry."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Renfro's essays are profoundly moving, written in a rich, deeply felt voice touched with wistfulness and melancholy that resists sentimentality and is unafraid of the violence that is a significant characteristic of both life and death."—Colorado Review

"Like a root system of a wooded hillside, Renfro's essays are elegantly woven meditations on cultural identity, natural history, coming of age, and death. . . . Here is a memoir that trades self-scrutiny for a broader examination of nature and culture, a lyric voice and perspective that increases our compassion for the world."—Orion

"Xylotheque will demand your careful attention. But it will repay your time and energy many-fold. It is a book you won't quickly forget."—Story Circle Book Reviews

"Renfro isn't afraid to take risks; Xylotheque has an essay for even the most discerning readers."—American Microreviews and Interviews

"Exquisite essays. . . . Five stars!"

—Enchantment

From the Publisher