Troubled Intimacies
David Axelrod
Having grown up amid the ravaged coalfields of Ohio, David Axelrod felt oddly at home when, twenty years ago, he moved west and saw his first clear-cut forest. In Troubled Intimacies, Axelrod explores his life in the rural interior West and the way in which surroundings, visible and invisible, shape our emotional and intellectual lives.
In describing his life and the lives of his neighbors in eastern Oregon's Grande Ronde Valley, Axelrod raises hard questions about the relationship between humans and the western landscape-a relationship too often predicated on disastrous violence. Axelrod reveals the dissonance that exists between the mythical American West and the far more complex, troubled relations we actually experience as individuals and communities in the western U.S. In these powerful and provocative essays, he shows the challenges and rewards of piecing together a meaningful life in the rural West.
About the author
DAVID AXELROD is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Open Hand and Folly, both from Lost Horse Press, as well as a previous collection of essays, Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West (Oregon State University Press). He is the editor of Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich and the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts, as well as the director of Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. In the spring of 2019, he joined Lynx House Press as its managing editor.
Read more about this author
Troubled Intimacies
Contents
Going Wild 1
A Westward-Going Heart 7
A Habit of Mind 28
Sonata of the Dwindling Year 41
The Fidelity of Thieves 52
April Fools 68
Sane at the Mind that Makes a Nest 74
A Rant 86
Healing In 94
Notes on the Erotic Life of the Household 106
Gathering: A Calendar 120
Jardín Romántico 139
The Dimensions of Hope 155
Here and Now 166
"This collection of wonderfully crafted essays demonstrates David Axelrod's remarkable talent for writing as well as his keen observations of both nature and humanity. Here we discover the intricacies of birds' nests and poetry, the excitement of beekeeping and stargazing, along with the hardscrabble of rural poverty, the challenges of being Jewish in the remote West. By turns humorous, wise, and poignant, Axelrod's prose is always graceful. Troubled Intimacies is a generous gift to the reader."