Formerly a park ranger, factory worker, and seller of cemetary plots, Joni Tevis is the author of two collections of essays: The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse, a Kirkus Best Book of 2015, and The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Poets & Writers, Orion, Ecotone, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She serves as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.
From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, the settings of these essays are often places of destruction and loss. And yet this collection transforms these eerie, apocalyptic destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection.
A stunning, intricate collection of forty lyric essays juxtaposing natural history, ancient texts, folk heroes, and found objects. Moving from cemeteries to parks—and always cast in the light of the author’s Southern upbringing—this is a collection written with a poet’s lyricism, a scientist’s precision, and a theologian’s understanding of the world as it shifts around us.
