A Desert Harvest Spiral-Bound | 2020-03-17

Bruce Berger

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A career-spanning collection of Bruce Berger's beautiful, subtle, and spiky essays on the American desert

Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger's essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of "desert books"--The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island--A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice.

Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America's seemingly desolate terrains.

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 272 pages
ISBN-10: 1250251125
Item Weight: 0.5 lbs
Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.8 x 11.3 inches
"There's geology, natural history, religion, desert rats, environmental issues, Mexican politics, music and adventure. There's disappointment and maturity and, above all, humor...Berger is clearly guided by the inner lizard that lives within all desert-lovers--scurrying in and out of crevices, basking upon rocks in the sun."--Los Angeles Times

"With his naturalist's eye and poet's sensibility, Bruce Berger has written a book that will stick to the reader like cholla. Environmental witness-bearers are many, but precious few are those who can write this well."--Ted Conover

BRUCE BERGER is a poet and nonfiction writer best known for a series of books exploring the intersections of nature and culture in desert settings. The first of these, The Telling Distance, won the 1990 Western States Book Award and the 1991 Colorado Book Award. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Sierra, Orion Magazine, and Gramophone; his poems have appeared in Poetry, Barron's, Orion Magazine, and various other literary reviews around the world.