✦ Released Tuesday via Wandering Aengus Press

“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 (FSG, 2018) and The High Heaven (Graywolf, 2025)

Preorder

Share

“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 (Chronicle Books, 2006) and High Weirdness.

“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 (N +1 Books, 2018)

Purchase

For more visit barretbaumgart.com