Anemoia

Anemoia is the word for a feeling most people can't quite name - nostalgia for a time or place you've never known, a longing for something just beyond the edge of memory. In this collection of travel essays and poems, Anthony Barrett Parr follows that feeling westward across four thousand miles of American road, from the Spanish moss of the Louisiana bayou to the red canyon country of New Mexico, from Roswell to the Gila and finally to the rim of the Grand Canyon itself.

What he finds along the way is not quite what he was looking for, which is, of course, the point. Anemoia is a book about movement as a form of self-examination, about the people you meet beneath oak trees and at the edges of bottomless lakes, about learning to sit still inside yourself while the road keeps going. Part memoir, part meditation, part lyric essay, it moves between prose and poetry the way a journey moves between intention and accident.

This is a book for anyone who has ever felt the pull of somewhere they've never been, and gone anyway.