All tagged nature writing

Be Holding

Be Holding

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, My List of Required Reads

Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.

Moth Snowstorm: Joy and Nature

Moth Snowstorm: Joy and Nature

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads

In Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), British naturalist writer Michael McCarthy mixes memoir and nature writing to present a stimulating, beautiful expose on the link between human joy and the natural world.  The book evolves from McCarthy’s environmental argument that nature is the one place in which humans may truly find joy.  Looking back at his 1950s childhood in northern England and the ways communing with nature soothed the traumas and chaos of human existence, McCarthy begins this work of nonfiction through memory and memoir.