Late Migrations

“Beautifully written, masterfully structured, and brimming with insight into the natural world, Late Migrations can claim its place alongside Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and A Death in the Family. It has the makings of an American classic.”

“A compact glory, crosscutting between consummate family memoir and keenly observed backyard natural history. Margaret Renkl’s deft juxtapositions close up the gap between humans and nonhumans and revive our lost kinship with other living things.”

“[Renkl] guides us through a South lush with bluebirds, pecan orchards, and glasses of whiskey shared at dusk in this collection of prose in poetry-size bits; as it celebrates bounty, it also mourns the profound losses we face every day.”

“One of the best books I’ve read in a long time … [and] one of the most beautiful essay collections that I have ever read. It will give you chills.”

“This warm, rich memoir might be the sleeper of the summer. She grew up in the South, nursed her aging parents, and never once lost her love for life, light, and the natural world. Beautiful is the word, beautiful all the way through.”

“Like the spirituality of Krista Tippett’s On Being meets the brevity of Joe Brainard … The miniature essays in Late Migrations approach with modesty, deliver bittersweet epiphanies, and feel like small doses of religion.”

“Clear-eyed revelations about the cycle of life and death … [Renkl’s] prose style is accessible and also astonishing.”

“Renkl feels the lives and struggles of each creature that enters her yard as keenly as she feels the paths followed by her mother, grandmother, her people. Learning to accept the sometimes harsh, always lush natural world may crack open a window to acceptance of our own losses. In Late Migrations, we welcome new life, mourn its passing, and honor it along the way.”

“This is the story of grief accelerated by beauty and beauty made richer by grief … Like Patti Smith in Woolgathering, Renkl aligns natural history with personal history so completely that the one becomes the other. Like Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Renkl makes, of a ring of suburbia, an alchemical exotica.”

“[A] stunning collection of essays merging the natural landscapes of Alabama and Tennessee with generations of family history, grief and renewal. Renkl’s voice sounds very close to the reader’s ear: intimate, confiding, candid and alert.”

“[A] magnificent debut … Renkl instructs that even amid life’s most devastating moments, there are reasons for hope and celebration. Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain.”

“Late Migrations is … an unexpected light shining, bringing beauty and clarity to loss. Renkl has depicted a glorious world in this collection—a glorious world not despite its darkness, but because of it. Her prose warms and welcomes you into her world of bewildering opposites that we all experience and can connect to grief and joy, life and death, fear and acceptance.”

“Late Migrations is a gift, and fortunate readers will steal away to a beloved nook or oasis to commune with its riches. Or they will simply dig into it, unprepared, like the mother with no gardening tools who determinedly pulls weeds until the ground blossoms. They might entrust it to fellow seekers they believe can handle its power. Consecrated, they’ll leave initiated into an art of observation lived beautifully in richness, connection, worry, and love.”

“Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations is such a beautiful book, you’ll want to gift it to someone you love. Meditative and poetic, without being stuffy, Renkl gets at the meanings in life.”

“Renkl holds my attention with essays about plants and caterpillars in a way no other nature writer can.”

“A close and vigilant witness to loss and gain, Margaret Renkl wrenches meaning from the intimate moments that define us. Her work is a chronicle of being. And a challenge to cynicism. Late Migrations is flat-out brilliant and it has arrived right on time.”

“Gracefully written and closely observed, Margaret Renkl’s lovely essays are tinged with the longing for family and places now gone while rejoicing in the flutter of birds and life still alive.”

“Late Migrations is the psychological and spiritual portrait of an entire family and place presented in quick takes—snapshots—a soul’s true memoir. The dire dreams and fears of childhood, the mother’s mysterious tears, the imperfect beloved family … all are part of a charged and vibrant natural world also filled with rivalry, conflict, the occasional resolution, loss, and delight. Late Migrations is a continual revelation.”