Limber: Essays

"What a strange and unexpected treasure chest this is, filled with all manner of quirky revelations, all about the mundane sublime and the ineffable extraordinary. Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, through, is the haunting perfection, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, of the writing itself. Who is this Angela Pelster and where has she been all our lives?"-Lawrence Weschler

Angela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the "Loneliest Tree in the World" once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we've inherited.

Angela Pelster's essays have appeared in Granta, the Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, the Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children's novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children's Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program and lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University.