Yoke and Feather - by Jessie Van Eerden (Paperback)

About the Book

A collection of braided essays that explores the concept of the everyday sacred. The essays delve into various experiences, including blessings for events like a demolition derby and a public-school lice check, a canoe trip through Boquillas Canyon on the Rio Grande, and a visit to the kitchen of biblical sisters Mary and Martha, who welcome an unexpected foster daughter.

Book Synopsis

May you braid back the hair of the girl who asks you to; may your lips brush other lips in an almost-kiss; when the chickens are gone, may you sow the coop in arugula; may the fogged-in mountain roads thread through your apocalyptic dreams and the cornbread and beans round your belly; may you always give away the thing you love most, like the dollar-store bracelet, or a picture of the sea.

In this stunning collection of braided essays, Yoke & Feather invites the reader into an exploration of the everyday sacred: blessings for the demolition derby and the public-school lice check, a canoe trip through Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande, and a visit to the kitchen of the biblical sisters, Mary and Martha, as they welcome their improbable foster daughter.

Rooted in a rural mountain childhood and threaded with Renaissance painting, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and midlife longing for a partner and child, these essays--both playful and deeply felt--reimagine familiar biblical narratives and chart the connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.

Review Quotes

"Jessie van Eerden's glittering essay collection Yoke & Feather is a work of exquisite longing marked by keenreflections on biblical tales...The essays in Yoke & Feather are gorgeous exercises in faith-filled, interconnected being."

--Foreword Reviews, starred review

"Van Eerden's essays blend an embodied and an ethereal experience of life...Often the reader gets a sense of being invited into a trance, as if the author's focus is really a smoky haze. So loaded with imagery, her sentences oblige readers to slow down and savor the words themselves. A strange, wonderful journey."

--Booklist

"Linking seemingly discordant experiences so apt they ring harmonious as playground song, Van Eerden ruminates within the mundane, connecting memories of past loves and losses to moments here and gone in a spidery blink, burrowing deep in search of illuminating connections. This moving collection explores the poetry only found in meditation on our deepest longings."

--Southern Literary Review

"Yoke & Feather is a sexy book, a holy book, where dream is exegesis, time is collapsed, and our bodies, 'all mange and burr and fat deer tick, ' are not barren after all. Even the maggot-cleaned bones are good. Jessie van Eerden has the gift of writing her particulars so that they become ours. Readerly, at times virtuosic, always kind, this book's vulnerability is stunning... I am ready for more literature that moves between OkCupid and Capernaum, aren't you?"
--Mary Margaret Alvarado, author of American Weather and Hey Folly

"A remarkable sweep of lodgings in time and place, from a campground in the modern-day American Southwest to the home and mind of Elizabeth in biblical Jerusalem. Van Eerden creates the collagen that connects these moments, all the while zeroing in on the miracle and the marvel of each of them, each essay exploding into its own star in this brilliant constellation of linked thought. ... Truly, these essays are a gift, van Eerden herself a literary giant. We are fortunate to have this voice among us."

--Jacinda Townsend, author of Mother Country and Saint Monkey

"Striving to be 'awake to Long Time so that we might have perspective on our small sorrows and the larger sorrows of the world, ' these essays situate the daily world of online dating, lipstick from the Family Dollar, and questions of whether to have a 'one-day daughter' within a reading and rereading of sacred texts so rich you can hear Martha bustling in your kitchen while Lazarus 'unstiffens his rigor mortis' in the other room. 'I seek the new story in the husk of an old mythic one, ' Jessie van Eerden writes, and in this seeking creates Yoke & Feather--moving, brilliant essays that leave you feeling 'something in you is activated, vowels breathed into your hard, bony consonants.'"
--Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone and Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going

"Yoke & Feather is a holy book, sagacious and vulnerable and profound. Van Eerden yearns for a child as she animates scripture as she paddles the Rio Grande as she cleaves the carcass of a deer shot by her new partner in the Appalachian woods. She has reverence for it all. To read these sentences is to attune oneself to the vibrations of a life full of tenderness and grief and awe--a life, as van Eerden says, 'kernelled with all possibilities.'"
--Courtney Zoffness, author of Spilt Milk