Siesta Lane
A Year Unplugged, or, The Good Intentions of Ten People, Two Cats, One Old Dog, Eight Acres, One Telephone, Three Cars, and Twenty Miles to the Nearest Town
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A poet at heart, Amy Minato rejects her life of consumption in Chicago to go back to nature—specifically, to a commune in Oregon, where she rediscovers herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When the urban bustle of Eugene, Ore., got to be too much, poet Minato (The Wider Lens) moved to a woodsy cabin on a commune and absorbed a year's worth of material for this uneven collection of essays and poems. Simplifying her life in the rustic surroundings, she learned that "it is freeing to emerge, even unwillingly, from the clutch of possessions." A decomposing raccoon attuned her to the realities of life and death, chopping wood taught her patience, and snails reminded her to slow down. Minato's lyrical prose tosses off beguiling evocations of the landscape and flora around her ("The pheasants come out of the grass like puffs of smoke") in almost every line. Unfortunately, her belletristic pens es can seem precious ("What is lost when I deny myself cloud-gazing?") and her denunciations of consumer society sound both strident and shallow ("Why must there be 30 kinds of cereal?... Every minuscule decision takes time and energy, takes me that much further away from my writing, the land, the people I love and my connection with everything deeper"). There is finely wrought nature writing here, but pat assumptions about rural authenticity and the corruptions of society make Minato's year on the land seem curiously unexamined. Photos.
