Yoke & Feather by Jessie van Eerden

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR YOKE AND FEATHER

"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 & Featheris 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 ofAmerican WeatherandHey 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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessie van Eerden is the author of two essay collections, Yoke & Feather and The Long Weeping, and three novels: Glorybound, My Radio Radio, and Call It Horses which won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Oxford American, AGNI, Image, New England Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Jessie holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University.