Description:
Award-winning author Amy M. Hale's third book of
essays from the land.
Brief description: Amy M. Hale is the author of Ordinary Skin and Rightful Place, the 2012 WILLA winner for creative nonfiction and Foreword Reviews Book of the Year for essays. She is also the author of Winter of Beauty and The Story Is the Thing. Hale cowboys for Spider Ranch in Yavapai County, Arizona, and performs poetry, speaking to groups all over the country.
Review Quotes: "When Amy Hale opened this book by saying she 'learned
to sing. With ink, on the page, ' she wasn't bragging. In this one-of-a-kind
outpouring, a woman standing just under 4′11″ enters middle age, and stares it
down by following Rilke's adage, 'You must change your life.' She then
gobsmacks us by becoming what she calls 'a cowboy, ' not a cowgirl--and her
efforts to master a life of daily work as challenging as physical labor gets
create the changed life Rilke recommends. 'We have read the ground and followed
tracks until we find cows standing in those tracks, ' Hale writes, not caring
what anyone thinks of what a life lived in the service of cattle has made of
her. 'I know who I am, ' she writes, then proves it with twenty-eight stories
set on 50,000 Arizona wilderness acres, told in a prose as bracing as the wild
water in her title." --David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The
Brothers K, and Sun House