Coiled - Ana Maria Spagna

This collection covers eight years of unrest, personal and communal, beginning with stubborn patriotic certainty, a faith in neighborliness and American ideals, and ending with something broader: an alliance with the matriarch, Mother Nature, and the ways she elides ideology or definition. The essays shift perspective to focus on subjects too often overlooked: unwritten histories of xenophobia in the American West, the rights of rivers everywhere, queerness in middle age, troubled human kin, and our more-than-human kin—snakes, fish, bears, sea lions, and a beloved robotic cat. These essays balance wonder at the world around us and urgency at the threats to it, but they add one more imperative: to focus on kinship—on the people we care for and those who care for us, and the more-than-human too.