Yoke & feather Essays

Van Eerden's (Call It Horses, 2021) essays blend an embodied and an ethereal experience of life. Her work leads readers into the physicality of tramping the hills of her home in West Virginia and canoeing Texas' Boquillas Canyon, where she and her lover, in middle age, have "busted parts." Van Eerden's rich, robust, and poetic imagination suffuses her wanderings. She longs for a child, but the longing may not be satisfied, and what does one do with an unfulfilled hope? She delves into familiar Bible stories, like that of Ruth and Boaz, in which she finds "a bounty that will never tally." She renders the Mary and Martha story afresh (taking in a foster girl) and allows Martha her own kind of tenderness; she finds solace in Elizabeth's barrenness and improbable pregnancy. Often the reader gets a sense of being invited into a trance, as if the author's focus is really a smoky haze. So loaded with imagery, her sentences oblige readers to slow down and savor the words themselves. A strange, wonderful journey.

This enigmatic collection from van Eerden (Call It Horses), a creative writing professor at Hollins University, finds holiness in everyday life. "A Thousand Faces," one of the volume's more traditional entries, offers a lyrical retelling of Moses's quest for revelation alongside van Eerden's search for adventure and meaning while on a canoeing trip with her partner through the canyons of the Rio Grande: "Maybe we came here to be awake to Long Time so that we might have perspective on our small sorrows and the larger sorrows of the world." Most of the selections are more oblique. For instance, in "Meet Me at the Dollar General Across from the Family Dollar," van Eerden strings together vignettes in which a young gymnast practices in the street, a church singer takes a transcendent solo, and a feather falls on the stones of a Spanish palace, each of which serves as a source of grace for van Eerden after a breakup. Some entries stray into impenetrability ("What I Want Your Voice to Do" struggles to tie together its ruminations on van Eerden's middle school basketball career, teaching creative writing, and the story of Lazarus), but her luminous prose will keep readers transfixed ("Sunday is bitter cabbage and the glimpse of shapes down a brief hallway"). Though not everything works, this mesmerizes. Agent: Michael Snell, Michael Snell Agency. (Nov.)