Amy Leach Selected Works

Where does freedom live? Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do? What on heaven and earth is an apicklypse? The Salt of the Universe raises these and other questions arising from Amy Leach’s experience, including her time playing fiddle and her childhood in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with its many prohibitions (coffee, dancing) and its emphasis on the apocalypse. The book argues against argument, but most of all against fundamentalisms of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity.

Are you feeling dismay, despair, disillusion? Need a break from the ho-hum, the hopeless, and the hurtful? Feel certain there’s a version of our world that doesn’t break down into tiny categories of alliance, but brings everybody together into one clattering chorus of glorious pandemonium? Amy Leach invites you into a book of praise songs, poetry, critique, soul-lifting philosophy, and whimsical but scientific trips into nature. It is equal parts joy and call to reason—where reason means taking care of the earth and everything in it.

From the cosmic to the quotidian, this collection of essays by Amy Leach asks us to reconsider our kinship with the wild world. The debut collection of a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. This book represents a major break-out of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own. Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways.