Wedding of the Foxes

A brilliant book and one to treasure in a time of extremity. . . lyric, gritty, vulnerable, tender, formally smart, powerfully quiet. Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, coping with pandemic isolation, and grappling with the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. This is when Larson encounters kintsugithe art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer. Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully varied range of forebears and predecessorsGaston Bachelard, Tawada Yko, Francis Pongewho share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontags examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer, and she writes letters to Japanese women writers whose work has taught her new ways of being. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments. Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulnessand the illuminating truth of our connections.