As she writes, 'The world is obscene with meaning.' John Bennion, author of Falling toward Heaven and An Unarmed Woman Pleasing Tree is a wakeful series of interdisciplinary excavations into how the human being, when out of options, begins to heal. This frolic across landscapes, cityscapes, and inscapes is purposeful play, exploring desert blandness and urban loneliness, seasonal affective disorder and communion with plants, the plight of Palestinians and of lovers, the science of stomach bacteria and the mysticism of light and water. Words conjoin and re-conjoin, kinky: facial beehive, piss alchemy, pan-species foreplay, sopping bloodknot, twilit bullshit.

Her language tumbles like a creek, dances like a flute player. Experience as viewed through lattices, the branches of a tree or the reticulations of the cultures she's adopted. Instead they ramble like her footprints-a crooked braid. While there are stories here, Larson never allows them to unfold in a straight line. Pleasing Tree is a natural history of Larson's vagrancies: guiding YoungWalkers in the Sonoran wilderness, drinking an Amazonian psychotropic herb on Rockaway Beach, falling in love with a dewdrop above Salt Lake City, pissing in the canyons between the buildings in Manhattan, or walking with an Armenian-Palestinian in Jerusalem's Christian Quarter. It pulses with blood and breath, excrement and the bodies of the living.

This collection crawls with insects, communicative plants, and poetry. Her essays track the impact the often unnoticed has on the human psyche, discovering the awe upon the recognition that even the desert's heart beats. Recalling Biblical and religious sojourns, Larson maps her own travels from the desert to Salt Lake City to New York City to Jerusalem, observing the life that curls in a leaf, the bug that spews cinnamon-flavored goo, and the water that occasionally floods the desert. Beginning with a Mormon-founded experiment in primitive survival, teenagers hike the Arizona desert while Larson shines light on the effects of prolonged exposure to the outdoors, to lands considered inhospitable to life.

Nominated for the 2020 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2020 Association for Mormon Letters Award for Creative Nonfiction! Brooke Larson's essay collection Pleasing Tree explores the human relationship with the wilderness.

Pleasing Tree by Brooke Larson