Joni Tevis's Books

The World Is on Fire

Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

By: Joni Tevis

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The World Is on Fire

Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

By: Joni Tevis

This “magnificently compelling” essay collection explores obsession, anxiety, and Existential dread from the Book of Revelation to the Liberace Museum (Minneapolis Star Tribune). The sermons of Joni Tevis’ youth filled her with dread, a sense “that an even worse story—one you hadn’t read yet—could likewise come true.” In this revelatory collection, she reckons with her childhood fears by exploring the uniquely American fascination with apocalypse. From a haunted widow’s wildly expanding mansion, to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, her settings are often places of destruction and loss. And yet Tevis transforms these eerie destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection. Whether she’s relating her experience of motherhood or describing the timbre of Freddy Mercury’s voice in “Somebody to Love,” she relies on the same reverence for detail and sense of awe. And by anchoring her attention to the raw materials of our world—nails and beams, dirt and stone, bones and blood—she discovers grandeur in the seemingly mundane. Winner of the 2016 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction Finalist for the 2016 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize

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Page Count

321

Publisher

Milkweed Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1571318984

ISBN 13

9781571318985

The Wet Collection

A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory

By: Joni Tevis

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The Wet Collection

A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory

By: Joni Tevis

Using such models as Joseph Cornell’s box constructions, crazy quilts, and specimen displays, Joni Tevis places fragments in relationship to each other in order to puzzle out lost histories, particularly those of women. Navigating the peril and excitement of outward journeys complicated by an inward longing for home, The Wet Collection follows Tevis through several adventures that coalesce into a narrative imbued with the light of Tevis’s Southern upbringing. Written with a poet’s lyricism, a scientist’s precision, and a theologian’s understanding of the world as it shifts around us, The Wet Collection is the exciting debut of a distinctive voice. "Tevis’s writing, a showcase for her interests in religion, memoir, natural study and women’s history, is precise and unique, and in this collection of musings, she builds big ideas out of small fragments...Far from the typical memoir or essay collection, this volume showcases a unique, meticulous and inviting voice.” — Publishers Weekly

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Page Count

193

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Milkweed Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1571318941

ISBN 13

9781571318947

The World is on Fire

Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

By: Joni Tevis

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The World is on Fire

Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

By: Joni Tevis

Grappling with a fear rooted in her by the end times sermons of her Southern youth, Joni Tevis seeks out apocalypse, destruction, and their aftermath in this heart-wrenching, but ultimately triumphant collection. Mining sources as disparate as the Bible and nuclear history, Tevis couples seemingly unrelated phenomena to reveal deeper meaning: reflections on Buddy Holly's last days lead to the Doom Town, where the American government tested the effects of nuclear weapons on suburban populations. Liberace's last days are juxtaposed with the entertainment complex the military built around weapons testing. Relating her own experience of childbirth to an Italian medical museum and ANWR, she explores both creating and losing life in a world freighted with danger. Throughout, Tevis brings a new sense of wonder to the objects and phenomena surrounding us, guiding the reader through a subtle arc from dread to acceptance, of the cycles of death and rebirth that rule our lives, even when we resist them.

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Page Count

304

Published Date

ISBN 10

1571313478

ISBN 13

9781571313478

Book's by Joni Tevis

The World Is on Fire

The World Is on Fire

The Wet Collection

The Wet Collection

The World is on Fire

The World is on Fire

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