Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties - Paperback

by Suzanne Roberts (Author)

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame--our taboo desires and our grief. In landscapes as diverse as Salamanca's cobbled streets, the Mekong River's floating markets, Fire Island's windswept beaches, Nashville's honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada's snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown and environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest.

With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

Author Biography

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska, 2020), Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), and four collections of poetry. Visit her website: suzanneroberts.net.