Yuck - by Barret Baumgart (Paperback)

About the Book

-Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness

Book Synopsis

Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer? Get ready to hate your life. It's not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake, the Joshua Tree.

"One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant... A landscape filled with Joshua Trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal." -Joseph Smeaton Chase, 1919

Similarly, few terms exist that do not fit Barret Baumgart's appalling YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtaposition, and a buried true history that will have you asking yourself the big questions, particularly... Why am I here?

Who knows, but here you are... in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a brief and searing ode to the world's hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.

From the publisher:

YUCK presents an unsettling new history of one of the most loathed and beloved objects on the planet, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. It primarily focuses on the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree beginning in the late 1870s in Southern California. The Joshua Tree was universally reviled as the most grotesque object on earth following its discovery by white Europeans in the 1840s. Numerous schemes arose to extirpate it from the planet, the most promising among them an attempt to turn the tree into paper, "California Cactus Paper" [YUCK is, of course, printed on faux CA Cactus Paper]. The book excavates this unknown, buried history against the ironic backdrop of the Joshua Tree today becoming the ultra-hip signifier of some kind of cultural authenticity, and its national park the most photographed and fastest growing in the nation #JoshuaTree. This current popularity boom, in a further irony, is occurring just as scientists warn that the tree will likely vanish due to climate change by the end of the century.

Review Quotes

YUCK is a prismatic collage, a poetic wandering, a compact history of the West as twisted and weird and ominous and beautiful as the plant it obsesses over. From divine providence to gaseous landfill to Instagram paradise, Yuck deftly traces the modern history of a small patch of desert to leave us with a big warning about America's demented relationship with the land. Baumgart's brief book will turn your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation and so should be required reading at the gates of the national park.

-Joshua Wheeler, author of Acid West and The High Heaven

Barret Baumgart's appropriately tangled and marvelous ode to the Joshua tree-part poetry, part cultural history, part confrontation with a Mojave mystery-deftly honors one of the Southwest's most compelling and symbolically rich inhabitants. It also confirms Baumgart's status as one of the leading chroniclers of the California weird.

-Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State and High Weirdness

I was prepared to be upset by YUCK. Unfortunately it's wonderful. The whole field of nature writing has really been tarred with a sort of excessive reverence for the natural world. YUCK does none of that. It's not disrespectful of the natural world, but there's an irreverence to the approach, which is really fun. And, in fact, I learned something.

-Chris Clarke, host of 90 Miles from Needles, Environmental Editor PBS SoCal

Barret Baumgart's YUCK is part tract or pamphlet, part prose poem, an uncomfortable yet entertaining meditation on California and nature in the tradition of both Robinson Jeffers and Mike Davis. Anyone who has visited the Joshua Trees in the Mojave Desert, anyone who lives in the Golden State or in the West, will want to read this natural history of yucca trees-with their grotesque arms like monsters in pain . . . stranded in tortured frenzy-that is also a brief unnatural history of what we have done to the place where they grow.

-A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018

Baumgart's ecstatic prose turns the Joshua Tree into a mind-expanding mirror. Through the prism of modern man's encounter with this singular, surreal tree, Barret Baumgart's YUCK illuminates the history of southern California and the carnival of human wastefulness and desire for transcendence that has fueled the evolution of the region from arid desert to epicenter of global consumption. YUCK is an unforgettable read that pulls you along with its propulsive, poetic language, and leaves you with a wide sobering view of the land and our all-too-human relation to it.

-Jesús Castillo, author of Two Murals

Barret Baumgart's fascinating YUCK offers the human-like trees, arms raised, as a metaphor for the overconsumption of the American West. Like desert winds combing through creosote and Yucca brevifolia, YUCK's ingenious approach to the stinky yet iconic desert tree shapes the archival into the lyrical, inviting readers into a captivating and urgent contemplation of the ecology, capitalism, and history of Los Angeles. In YUCK, with"the whispered cough of a word, uncouth in sound-yucca, yucca", Baumgart offers a story of climate disaster and climate tourism, inviting us to encounter the Joshua tree as an elegiac symbol and warning.

-Tyler Mills, author of The Bomb Cloud

"Amazing... YUCK is a really thought provoking book that uncovers a wild history and challenges you to think about the way we look at and appreciate nature."

-Matt Candeias, author and host of In Defense of Plants Podcast