Jul 19, 2020
Leslie Jamison on her selection:
More than anything, I love Brian Doyle for his awe. It's not a blinding or a blunting awe, the kind of awe that scours away the grit and grain and difficulty of things -- it's more like supple attention, an awe not just for hummingbird hearts the size of pencil erasers or whale hearts with valves like swinging saloon doors, but for a mother's papery hand in the thicket of her son's hair -- for the way that tenderness and mortality live side by side, proximity and loss are never far apart. It's an awe for the infinitudes that live in the daily and the ordinary, because what else do we have? It's an awe that gulps the little things the way a hummingbird heart gulps oxygen. It's an awe that knows we're all going to die. It's an awe that knows we'll never be known as fully as we dream of being known. It's an awe that keeps looking anyway, keeps knowing anyway. I've used Doyle as ammunition to fuel reckless love affairs; I've read him to my toddler daughter. His voice feels like an invitation to be baffled by the world, and stunned by it.
One Long River at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0