Aimee Nezhukumatathil

At the Drive-In Volcano was new to me, even as Aimee Nezhukumatathil was not. I enjoyed getting to read her poetry after loving her essays. These poems are made of the close observations of nature enmeshed with the personal that made World of Wonders so amazing. Nezhukumatathil lives in a world where humans and nature are fully entwined, and finds that a cause for celebration, even when it is a little slimy, disconcerting, or intimidating. I love getting to visit her brain.

In an interview with the author at the end of this book, Ross Gay says, “In addition to being lyrical reveries and love songs and tender remembrances, some of these essays are also alarms, as Aimee writes of the octopus: ‘I am certain it knows we humans are messing up entirely, that in just a matter of decades the oceans will become unswimmable to any of us animals.’” This is as good a summary as any I’ve seen. This is a collection of personal essays in which nature features show more prominently, but it’s more reflection and memoir than “nature writing,” per se. Aimee Nezhukumatathil is first and foremost a poet, so each of the natural wonders featured in each chapter serves as a metaphor or a springing-off point for personal memories or reflections. While there’s plenty of concern about the ecological crises we face, there is also plenty of serenity and joy. Here’s a sampling of some of the lovely writing:

“These tests involve the repeated amputation of [axolotl] limbs over a hundred times. What does the lab technician say after the ninety-fifth day, perhaps, of this kind of work? Just five more to go, and we’ll close up the report! How does that person come home and forget those hundreds of estranged arms and legs? It’s hard to remember axolotls are endangered when you see their bodies regenerate parts so quickly, when they ‘smile’ at you in aquariums, their pink gills waving as they study you and your own fixed mouth.”

“I swear, somewhere in the backwaters of Kerala, those bonnet macaques are still having a good laugh over us—a couple trying to navigate that wild jungle, those even wilder early days of this thing called marriage.”

“These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen, sound waves breaking just so, and fly out of the way. How did they pass on this knowledge of the invisible? Does this message transmit through the song they sing to themselves on their first wild nights, spinning inside a chrysalis? Or in the music kissed down their backs as they crack themselves open to the morning sun? Does milkweed whisper instructions to them as it scatters in the meadow?”

In the chapter on the barreleye fish, which has large, tubular, upward-pointing eyes, she reminisces about getting glasses, going to the library, swimming at night, and learning the constellations from her father. “If you want to find Pegasus, look for that distinctive square—the plump belly of the horse—look up, look up. The winged horse still flies there without ever losing a feather—over you and me, and all the seas.” show less

I spent an exceptionally pleasant afternoon reading this gem by acclaimed poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders. Is there a "nature memoir" book category? She lovingly praises parts of nature that have struck her fancy.

"It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world.

“How can one even imagine us getting back to a show more place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where “a bird” navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher. Or that “big tree”: catalpa. Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.”

She uses these small starts to lead her to musing about their relationship to her life - as a child, as a mother, as a wife and as a poet. some of my favorite chapters were about potoos (little birds that eat mosquitoes), dragonfruit (a childhood delicacy) and fireflies, which take her in several directions. Flamingos remind her of nights joyfully dancing as a teen, and the fear of encountering a bad guy on the dark walk home. Some things remind her of her experiences as a brown girl among whites.

“I began scribbling in notebooks and notebooks, trying to write my way into being since I never saw anyone who looked like me in books, movies, or videos. None of this writing was what I would remotely call poetry, but I know it had a lyric register. I was teaching myself (and badly copying) metaphor. I was figuring out the delight and pop of music, and the electricity on my tongue when I read out loud. I was at the surface again. I was once more the girl who had begged my parents and principal to let me start school a whole year early. And I was hungry.”

This is one worth owning. Kudos to my bride for giving it to me. show less

Summary: A combination of memoir and nature writing describing the variety of living creatures encountered by the author in the different places where she lived and her own lived experience in these places.

Great nature writing enables the reader to envision at least in the mind’s eye, the landscape the writer is describing with fresh and wondrous eyes. Such writing is very simply, great writing. There is also something of the writer in the narrative, whether we think of Aldo Leopold, show more Wendell Berry, or Henry David Thoreau. This work has all these elements. Little wonder it has won numerous awards including Barnes and Noble’s 2020 Book of the Year.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil has lived in a number of places growing up and in her adult life, from the grounds of a mental institution in Kansas where her mother worked to the lake effect winters of upstate New York to the lush landscape of northern Mississippi. She caught my attention from the opening words:

“A catalpa can give two brown girls in western Kansas a green umbrella from the sun. Don’t get too dark, too dark, our mother would remind us as we ambled out into the relentless mid-western light”

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, P.1

From these opening words, we discover that this book is both about the wonders of the natural world like a catalpa’s big leaves or long seed pods, but also the experience of growing up a brown-skinned Filipina in many white-skinned contexts. Yet this comes through with a strong sense of her own uniqueness, her own wonder amid the wonders she sees in the natural world.

She goes on to write of both common and uncommon creatures. She evoked my own memories of catching and releasing fireflies, which sadly, because of pesticides, seem to be declining.

“I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig, and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let that jar’s sweet glow serve as a night-light to cool and cut the air for me.”

AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, PP. 13-14.

I am searching, at least in memory with her.

In subsequent chapters, she writes of peacocks, comb jellies, narwhals, the curious looking axolotl, the putrid smelling but impressive corpse flower, dragon fruit, flamingoes, doing a bird census with her children, and the Southern Cassowary, one of the only birds who can kill a human being with a swipe of its knife-like talon.

She describes being the new girl in high school in Beavercreek, Ohio, a toney suburb of Dayton. She wished she were like the vampire squid, who ejects a mucous luminescent cloud to evade pursuers. Thankfully, things got much better for her!

What is most surprising is that this woman teaches creative writing but spent one sabbatical studying whale sharks, allowing one to swim just beneath her stomach. She offers both biologically accurate descriptions of the various species of which she writes and her own sense of wonder in her encounters, and the life situations they recall.

All this made me want to pay closer attention to the things I see on my walks, whether bird calls, the bark of trees, the flow of sap in my maples, the skunks that occasionally visit my suburban neighborhood (but not too close), the squirrels racing up and down our lindens, and the fireflies that light up when we sit out on a summer evening. I think this would gladden the author, who laments that 17 of her 21 students had never seen a firefly, not because they are extinct, but because they were indoors on their videogames. She makes me wonder how we will care enough to act to preserve the creation when we do not attend to its wonders enough to not want to lose them. show less