Bøker av Jessie van Eerden

May you braid back the hair of the girl who asks you to; may your lips brush other lips in an almost-kiss; when the chickens are gone, may you sow the coop in arugula; may the fogged-in mountain roads thread through your apocalyptic dreams and the cornbread and beans round your belly; may you always give away the thing you love most, like the dollar-store bracelet, or a picture of the sea.In this stunning collection of braided essays, Yoke & Feather invites the reader into an exploration of the everyday sacred: blessings for the demolition derby and the public-school lice check, a canoe trip through Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande, and a visit to the kitchen of the biblical sisters, Mary and Martha, as they welcome their improbable foster daughter.Rooted in a rural mountain childhood and threaded with Renaissance painting, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and midlife longing for a partner and child, these essays—both playful and deeply felt—reimagine familiar biblical narratives and chart the connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.

In this collection of portraits, the eye is the vital "lamp of the body," a spiritual organ van Eerden uses to craft essays that are as much encounters as they are likenesses, as much being seen as seeing. Historical subjects like Simone Weil and the Beguines confront the author's imaginative and intellectual being, while the viscerally close foci of family and a lost marriage must also be reckoned with. The author's religious tradition and the rural landscape of Terra Alta, West Virginia are two backgrounds that are neither chosen nor fully understood, but van Eerden's attention to these matters becomes its own form of devotion, a longing to see and to believe-the longing itself taking on the robustness of faith. This is the common goal of these essays, to fully meet each subject and return to it some form of wholeness, a quest full of lush imagery and insights.

Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for FictionSet in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women-niece, aunt, and stowaway-and an improbable road trip. Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan-with a hound in tow-set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiqui and the desert of Georgia O'Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they've known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave's dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived. With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth-and herself-the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.

The members of Dunlap Fellowship of All Things in Common share everything from their meager incomes to the only functioning toilet in the community house - everything, that is, except secrets. When Omi Ruth Wincott loses her only brother, Woodrun, she withdraws from everyone and fixates on a secret desire: she wishes only for an extravagant headstone to mark Woodrun's grave.