The Everybody Ensemble
Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In short, gloriously inventive essays, Whiting Award-winning author Amy Leach's The Everybody Ensemble invites us to see and celebrate our oddball, interconnected world
Humans, please turn your guns into kazoos.
Are you feeling dismay, despair, disillusion? Need a break from the ho-hum, the hopeless, and the hurtful? Feel certain that there’s a version of our world that doesn’t break down into tiny categories of alliance but brings everybody together into one clattering, sometimes discordant but always welcoming chorus of glorious pandemonium?
Amy Leach, the celebrated author of the transcendent Things That Are, invites you into The Everybody Ensemble, an effervescent tonic of a book. These short, wildly inventive essays are filled with praise songs, poetry, ingenious critique, soul-lifting philosophy, music theory, and whimsical but scientific trips into nature. Here, you will meet platypuses, Tycho Brahe and his moose, barnacle goslings, medieval mystics, photosynthetic bacteria, and a wholly fresh representation of the biblical Job.
Equal parts call to reason and to joy, this book is an irrepressible celebration of our oddball, interconnected world. The Everybody Ensemble delivers unexpected wisdom and a wake-up call that sounds from within. For readers of Ross Gay, Eula Biss, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Lewis Carroll, these twenty-four essays will be a perfect match.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this eccentric essay collection, Pushcart Prize–winner Leach (Things That Are) defends the dignity of all organisms, giving voice to animals, plants, and microbes alike. At the work's heart is her ideology of "everybodyism," a version of universalism that includes "not just all the human rascals but also all the buffalo rascals and reptile rascals and paddlefish and turkeys and centipedes and wombats and warty pigs." The essays are short and amusing, with Leach's lighthearted humor and charming brand of absurdism on full display—in "Non Sequiturs," she encourages resistance to dogmatism, writing, "Linnets have no tenets; any animal, in response to religious dogma, says, ‘That's just religion talking.' Dogness defies dogma." "Sleepers Awake" celebrates divinity in the wonderful variety of stuff on Earth, while "Haunted by Hedgehogs" considers misinformation-filled medieval bestiaries. The strength of Leach's prose is in her turns of phrases, which are plentiful and playful ("Gravity can be a good friend, but I have noticed that he plays favorites"). She meanders from one subject to the next, and though this can sometimes betray a lack of focus, her profoundly empathetic perspective keeps things grounded. There's much to savor in this quirky mix of sharp writing and quick wit.
