Wedding of the Foxes

From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, isolated by the pandemic, and increasingly aware of the disappearance of species and entire ways of being, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. “Even in this age of grief and extinction,” she writes, “I knew that I didn’t want numbness.”This is when Larson encounters kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer. Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully various range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.