Greyhound - by Joanna Pocock (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers--Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz--who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity.

Review Quotes

"Joanna Pocock's Greyhound is an intimate epic, and a fierce mirror held to our U.S. ecological and sociological present such as only a visitor, seemingly, can provide. The thinking is scrupulous, the writing scraped and glinting and as stark as the landscape. This book kept me up all night and will stay with me." --Jonathan Lethem

"Pocock reveals a complicated American landscape from the shabby seats of Greyhound buses and through a pinhole of grief as she retraces her past and a country's past and finds suffering and redemption in both. She is at the mercy of the communities and the country she encounters, which, like the nation itself, is also in gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson's Angels and Jonathan Raban's Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamourous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil." --Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town

"Greyhound is an instant classic, a chronicle of desperation, anger, and violence, as well as the luminous beauty and humanity that four decades of neoliberal looting have been unable to kill off from the American countryside. Pocock's eye is sharp and her prose crackles with wistfulness, fleeting camaraderie, and vitality. Not since William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways has a book so captured the feeling of the road." --Daegan Miller, author of This Radical Land

"Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, Joanna Pocock rides the bus through our broken America with the eyes of a time traveler, on highways that are also paths through memory, skillfully intertwining narratives of her own journeys through different stages of life and others who have traced similar routes. Greyhound bears witness to how the damage we feel in our own lives and communities is rooted in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live, and in doing so provides a powerful prism through which to think about where we have been, where we are going, and other roads we could take." --Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author of A Natural History of Empty Lots and Tropic of Kansas

"Greyhound is a cool, generous book, an eyewitness account of the end of an empire. I liked crossing the USA in Pocock's company--she is open in her encounters and thinks carefully about it all: appification, motel breakfasts, dawn over the mountains, the people who queue at the bus stop. The journey felt seamless and absorbing, like a long take." --Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency

"Pocock's writing is intellectually and emotionally thrilling. In Greyhound she brings us on a road trip through America's alienated hinterlands--anonymous motels, all-night diners, blighted backstreets--as she builds a kind of philosophy of transience. I'd follow her anywhere." --Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

"In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers." --Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

"Joanna Pocock's haunting, haunted journey across America's edgelands tells a troubled story of the country's journey to a more insular version of itself. Yet the dream of travel still holds, and the way we move can still move us. Her eye for the beauty of the gas station and the entrancing ennui of motel-land call to mind the photographs of Robert Adams and Blood in the Tracks-era Dylan. Most of all, she captures the camaraderie and transcendence of bus travel, where 'strangers are connected by the simple need to get somewhere.' Greyhound is as expansive as the landscape it travels through." --David Farrier, author of Nature's Genius

About the Author

JOANNA POCOCK is an Irish Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain Project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation's Environmental Writing Award. She was short-listed for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award in 2023 for Greyhound.