Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE RSVP HERE.
Come join Milkweed Books and Graywolf Press as we launch The Age of Loneliness by LAURA MARRIS. She will be joined in reading and conversation by Victoria Blanco, Kathryn Savage, and Moheb Soliman.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this debut essay collection, LAURA MARRIS reframes environmental degradation by setting aside the conventional, catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species. She asks: How do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what’s missing in the landscapes closest to us?
Filled with equal parts alienation and wonder, each essay immerses readers in a different strange landscape of the Eremocene. Among them are the Buffalo airport with its snowy owls and the purgatories of commuter flights, layovers, and long-distance relationships; a life-size model city built solely for self-driving cars; the coasts of New England and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and horseshoe crabs; and the Connecticut woods MARRIS revisits for the first time after her father’s death, where she participates in the annual Christmas Bird Count and encounters presence and absence in turn. Vivid, keenly observed, and driven by a lively and lyrical voice, The Age of Loneliness is a moving examination of the dangers of loneliness, the surprising histories of ecological loss, and the ways that community science—which relies on the embodied evidence of “ground truth”—can help us recognize, and maybe even recover, what we’ve learned to live without.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
LAURA MARRIS is a writer and translator. She is a MacDowell fellow and the recipient of a
Silvers Grant for Work in Progress. She teaches creative writing at the University of Buffalo.
VICTORIA BLANCO’s first book, Out of the Sierra: A Story of Raramuri Resistance, was published by Coffee House Press in 2024. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult, and others. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA, and she lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three sons.
KATHRYN SAVAGE is the author of Groundglass: An Essay (Coffee House Press), which explores topics of environmental justice and links between pollution and public health. Groundglass was named a best read of the year by the Sydney Morning Herald, a Yale Review Favorite Cultural Artifact, and was showcased in Orion Magazine, Lit Hub, and selected by EcoLit Books as a Best Environmental Book of 2022. Other writing has recently appeared in Ecotone, Guernica, VQR, and she is a frequent book review contributor to World Literature Today. Savage is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
MOHEB SOLIMAN is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who’s presented work at literary, art, and public spaces around North America and abroad with support from diverse institutions. He was Program Director for the Arab American arts organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and most recently a Milkweed Editions fellowship. His debut poetry collection HOMES has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards and featured in Ecotone Journal and Poets & Writers. It is about nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion and borderland.