Limber: Essays

by Angela Pelster

"What a strange and unexpected treasure chest this is, filled with all manner of quirky revelations, all about the mundane sublime and the ineffable extraordinary. Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, through, is the haunting perfection, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, of the writing itself. Who is this Angela Pelster and where has she been all our lives?"-Lawrence Weschler

Angela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the "Loneliest Tree in the World" once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we've inherited.

Angela Pelster's essays have appeared in Granta, the Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, the Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children's novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children's Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program and lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Nature, History, Poetry, Literature, Natural History

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 24, 2014

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gonna reread the essay Rot an ungodly amount of times

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started Limber last night and the first essay blew me away. The writing reminds me how in The Writing Life Annie Dillard may seem to wander off point in the course of an essay but, once you finish each piece, you realize there is nothing there that doesn't belong. Each detail and thought is intentional. I am reading along expecting thoughts on trees and all the sudden I am deep in a mine shaft or playing street hockey on a freakishly warm winter night. But always the trees are there ready to support, to grow, to rot, to feed, to spear.

Reading Limber also brings to mind one of my favorite books, "Pine Island Paradox" by Kathleen Dean Moore and a poetry collection by Tanis Rideout titled "Arguments with the Lake" which is essentially an collection of stories in verse arguing for saving our lakes and rivers. Very engaging and unusual work.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Limber
By Angela Pelster
Sarabande Books, 154 pgs
From the publisher
Rating: 3.5 of 5

The first line of Limber is "It is still winter." Indeed. This is the wintriest spring I can remember in west Texas. Persephone is lingering in the warmth. But I digress.

Limber is Angela Pelster's debut collection of seventeen heedful and often elegiac essays, meditations at the juncture of the natural world and language. I made a point of reading this slim volume outside, under an elderly just-budding mesquite tree. Some will deride this tree as not a tree but a large shrub. It's what we have. The author has many more and larger trees: poplar, redwood, mango, mountain ash, acacia, and the eponymous limber pine, among others.

There is the Burmis Tree, a local landmark in Burmis, Alberta, Canada, a limber pine, so named "...for the ways they bend in the harsh winds and grow in curves around it; they slither their roots along rock faces until they find cracks they can slip into and drink from." There is the Tree That Owns Itself, a white oak, in Athens, Georgia, that the purported owner loved so much that he deeded the tree and the land surrounding it to it. There are the Moon Trees, sprouted from seeds that orbited the moon with astronaut Stuart Roosa of Apollo 14 fame. There is L'Arbre du Ténéré (The Loneliest Tree in the World), an acacia, the only tree for 250 miles in the Sahara, northern Niger. My favorite essay is "How Trees Came to Be in the World" (pg 135). I don't think I've read a more accessible account of evolution anywhere, truly.

I enjoyed this collection, although I was confused by a few of the essays that either don't seem to fit even the broad theme or are so nebulous as to seem to be about, well, what exactly? Maybe these essays do belong in this particular collection and I'm not seeing the connection. Believe me, that's entirely possible. Now that's out of the way and we can focus on the good stuff. Pelster does not romanticize nature, which is refreshing and a relief. Romanticizing shouldn't be necessary. She is angry when anger is called for, magnanimous when capable, always empathetic. Pelster's gift of description is powerfully evocative. On the collapse of a mountain from decades of mining blasts: "The falling rock created a sucking wind. It inhaled the mud of the river bottom with a gulp and spit a wave of violence before it." On the humidity in a redwood forest in northern California: "...the air was so wet you could suck the rain from it with your lips." A metaphysical observation in the same forest:

"The signs also said that the tallest tree in the world is a redwood in California. It was the land of giants, I thought, and difficult to know where the myth began and the truth ended. Ask a poplar if it believes in redwoods and it might start talking about faith."

When the Burmis Tree finally gave up the ghost to rot it was propped up again with steel and chains. When the Tree That Owns Itself succumbed to a storm the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, grown from an acorn, replaced it. When the Loneliest Tree in the World was mowed down by a drunken truck driver the trunk and limbs were glued back together and placed on display. Our willful illusions will not suffice. We cannot leave well enough alone.

"A tree ring marks a year of growth, but it isn't marking it for humans. The rings are a memory of what the seasons brought and what the tree made of it. The widest rings are the good years, recorded in thick dark circles of brown, and the hungry years are narrow and pale and hard to read."

After the countless blows inflicted to the body of our mother, what story will the trees tell about us?

Angela Pelster’s essays have appeared in Granta, The Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, The Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine and others. Her children’s novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice award in 2006. She lives with her family in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University.

National Arbor Day is April 25th. Click here to find out what you can do.

Limber arrived with a thoughtful gesture: a seed-embedded leaflet that you can plant and flowers will grow. I'm gonna go do that now. My mesquite needs company.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved, loved, loved. All these essays are joy, but I particularly loved "Rot" and "How Trees Came to Be in the World."

"I start noticing the edges of things, the way perimeters are consumed and rot runs on schedule, the way control is temporary and the possibility of chaos flutters around the edges of home like a moth against the windows. It isn't only the body's decay that waits in the wings to pounce - that one is obvious, we all know what comes for us in the end - but it is the loosening of anchors, the slip-up into no return that worry me the most. The man on the sidewalk who holds out a cracked palm as I pass is not the elected poor. He wanders into city hall and sits at the grand piano and plays until you weep. And the woman downtown in the pale green cardigan who constantly asks for quarters used to teach in the philosophy department at the University of Alberta. I have friends who knew her then. / So I make my own damn schedules." p 99, in "Rot"

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them – the whole leaf and root tribe.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

When it comes to wide-ranging framing devices, it’s always practical to look to the building blocks of the natural world: elements, weather, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; all things spring wherefrom and such. And along those lines you can’t go too wrong with trees—“trees of life” having been relational allegories of choice throughout most cultures’ mythology, the Bible, and Charles Darwin, to name just a few sources. Trees as metaphors, trees as real objects, trees as ideal states of being—they’re pretty unobjectionable. So the question becomes, how do you use the fact of them in a dynamic way?

Angela Pelster has put together a series of essays, loosely grouped around the subject of trees, in her recent collection, Limber. It’s a fine idea, essays that relate to each other from a central concept much in the same way that trees branch up and out from a root system, and in the way that we are connected to nature—and nature is connected to us—in forms both massive and tenuous. Pelster’s essays range from tales of actual trees—“The Loneliest Tree in the World,” austere in the Sahara; the tremendous Moreton Bay figs of Australia; or the limber pines of the book’s title, which grip rock faces by slotting their roots into cracks—to highly personal essays in which people take center stage, and the trees are incidental, such as “Portrait of a Mango,” a meditation that encompasses Vermeer, the color yellow, and her connection to her mother.

Nature, predictably, has a starring role in many pieces, and these are some of the book’s strongest. Pelster knows how to showcase the natural world in all its hot and heavy glory:

It was the kind of place with redwoods large enough to drive a van through, and where families of six would try to hold hands around a trunk but couldn’t. Everything smelled of rotting plants, of bursting spores and red dirt and moss. Mushrooms, big enough to sit on, bloomed from the sides of trees and the air was so wet you could suck the rain from it with your lips.

In fact, Limber is strongest when it’s engaging straight on with the forces of the world, spores and wind and heartwood—the strangely alchemical substance at the core of a tree. Decay, as it should, has a certain pride of place in the collection, and as she points out, “Sometimes rot is gracious.”

As soon as an animal’s heart stops beating, the chemicals in its body change and so its pH levels change and so its cells lose their structural integrity. They sway and crash like an old house in the wind. Cellular enzymes spill free from the wreckage and begin to eat away at the other cells and tissues, releasing more enzymes, more crashing, more destruction. Scientists call this autolysis: self-digestion.

There are engaging meditations on mining, evolution, Bartholomäus Traubeck’s tree ring music, and a wonderfully unexpected turn on nuclear fallout in Russia; also some pieces that make you wonder why, exactly, they were included. An essay about a boy in a group home, presumably where Pelster once worked, is moving but doesn’t seem to quite fit, and another, “Inosculation,” feels like a stand-along short story. She covers a lot of ground here—a lot of forest. And while there are some compelling overriding themes, such as her interrogation of the religion she was raised with, which she clearly both values and questions, and her shifting thoughts on fate, the center doesn’t always hold. If we’re going to keep on with the metaphor, the book is all branches and no trunk; it’s often a struggle to keep in mind that this is a themed set of essays.

At the same time, the strongest pieces resonate. And if a reader is obliging enough to look at the collection as an ongoing inquiry into the constantly shifting places that nature, man, and God occupy, the book takes on a certain curious breadth. Pelster explains:

I collect the signs like a doctor tapping on a patient’s body, looking into ears, pressing on a spine, drawing blood from the unseen places. It is difficult to know when one of these will come to something, when some bit of evidence will be made luminous in the beautiful light, when the world will bend and let slide a little secret from its corner.

Not all the signs reveal what she’s aiming for. But many of the essays are quite beautiful, and spark some interesting trains of thought. Pelster is a fine writer, and a tighter collection might have thrown her thoughts into sharper relief.

Some books, like wines, want pairing, and I’d love to see Limber—with its lovely rorschach-y tree drawings that separate each chapter—matched up with Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings with Remarkable Trees, a marvelous photo-illustration-essay collection that celebrates the things themselves, and their ineffable personalities. Even on its own, though, Limber is an often quirky, sometimes profound ramble through some interesting and diverse woods. Not to drag out the metaphor too far, that is. As Pelster notes,

[…] but who needs another tree metaphor about change and weathering the storms and remaining beautiful through it all? A tree is not a metaphor. A tree is a tree, and we are both only one strong wind away from falling.

[Bingustini · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Limber, Angela Pelster exhibits a incredibly varied essays, all of which are tied to trees and human-tree relationships. Given this variety, there is a significant chance a good number of the essays will miss the mark for you. That said, even the ones I didn't connect with were engaging, and by the same token, there is likely to be something in this collection that really speaks to you (for me it was "Temple").

Pelster takes quite a bit of artistic license in describing trees, and if you really want to gain a scientific understanding of your woody companions, this is not the book for you. Nevertheless, Pelster introduces a number of intriguing subjects that will lead you to do your own investigation (for me it was regarding L'Arbre du Ténéré).

If you are a fan of both creative nonfiction and trees, you will adore this book. If you like just one of them, you will still enjoy it quite a bit.

[KileyV · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third time (?) indulging this slim book of essays. I return when I need to sip from the fountain. What a glorious celebration of trees and language, researched in a way I have a million questions about. Angela Pelster, maybe I should send you a letter.

[John LaPine · Rating 5 out of 5]

collection of essays each about a tree in some (sometimes roundabout) way. beautiful, engaging, lyrical, informative. one of the best collections I've read

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful essays, in a beautiful book on nature and people and how they often awkwardly intertwine.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very archaeological!

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

A whole book of essays about trees; how is that even possible? Angela Pelster makes it happen in her sleek collection containing 17 essays, usually around 5 pages each. With titles like “Temple” and “Ethan Lockwood” and “Artifacts,” you may not immediately get the connection to trees. More so, you may not have a sense of direction with the content. But Pelster leads readers along and takes us to unknown territory that opens up like the door through which Dorothy crosses from black-and-white into a color-filled world in Oz.

In a number of Pelster’s pieces, I forgot she was behind the scenes pulling the marionette strings, which left me space to take in the information unimpeded. In the essay “Burmis,” the author describes the now-gone town of Frank, a place where people continued mining despite the dangerous work. The land has a long history of forcing people to leave. But the miners just wouldn’t–not even when a landslide took out part of the town: “The survivors on the safe side of town continued to live alongside the dead, as if their neighbors and their neighbors’ houses beneath the limestone existed in a secret other world, as if they still hung bed sheets to dry on the clothesline below ground, swept floors, cooked dinner in the dark.” Though Pelster must have researched the history of Burmis, Alberta, her authorial link is seemingly transparent, and she knows when to be “out of the way.” Occasionally, she weaves in personal experience, but with the exception of the essay “Rot,” it’s subtle.

The way Angela Pelster teaches readers about trees is enough to make those who read Limber change their minds about the very subject. Did you know that the apostle Paul apparently ate figs on his trip to Cyprus, planting trees from the remains of the fruit on his way? That the pigment Indian Yellow was supposedly made from the urine of cows that were only fed leaves from the mango tree? That in 1832 William Henry Jackson deeded a tree to itself? That tree seeds were taken by Apollo 14 to the moon, later presumed dead, then planted and grew? These are but a few of the topics that Pelster uncovers in her essays, exploring them in a way that shows readers that she’s conveying stories about living organisms that are fundamental to humanity and its history. She gives statistics and anecdotes to support her ideas.

The essays don’t read like a textbook of either science or history, though. The attention to each individual word is enormous. Some lines are lyrical and reflect the curling shapes of leaves while others are straightforward and make readers snap to attention. On finding bones in the desert sand: “Overnight, the wind reburies what took the paleontologists hours to unearth, and the desert rearranges itself, tucking its children back into bed while they sleep”–lyrical. As rot chronicles the decay of a squirrel’s body outside her window, Pelster notes how we are programed to do as much: “Scientists call this autolysis: self-digestion. It comes from two Greek words meaning ‘self-splitting.’ As if bodies carry inside themselves the potential to undo themselves.”–straightforward. Both methods appear in every essay, combining unique, factual information with a fiction writer’s eye for pleasing word arrangement and choices.

I discovered that it was easy to get lost in these essays, to block out the noise around me. The works becomes like dreams. The collection explores nature in a way that made me care deeply about it, not just metaphorically or in a way that makes me hate technology for a day or two. The reading experience was much like a gentle, shallow river that made me appreciate the life of individual trees and the experiences they record in their bodies and the way those experiences can educate me.

This review was originally published at Grab the Lapels.

[K]

Finished a while ago and has been so busy I haven't updated! This was a wonderful, interesting book. Really helpful from a craft perspective. Really loved some of the essays. My only critique was sometimes I wanted to know where the author was in the stories—she definitely was more "eye" than "I" and sometimes... I craved a bit more "I."

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do not come to the book looking for spiritual lessons brought to you courtesy of trees. There are some lessons here for those who want them, although they might be lessons in evolutionary theory or the realities of foster home care. And there are trees, either planted squarely in the center or along the property line of each short piece,

This short book is wide-ranging, but Pelster states her method within the context of an essay on mangoes.

I suppose none of it really comes to anything, but I pay attention anyway. I collect the signs like a doctor tapping on the patient's body, looking into ears, pressing on a spine, drawing blood from the unseen places. It is difficult to know when one of these will come to something, when some bit of evidence will be made luminous in the beautiful light, when the world will bend and let slide a little secret from its corner.

[Madelyn Strauss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this collection of essays was quite interesting. I read it for my American Nature Writers class in college, and I thought it brought up some interesting perspectives about the world and the nature of things. This was especially true with the Bats essay and how Pelster was noticing the small intrinsic beauty within the interaction of animals, and that we as humans can learn a lot from them. I thought Pelster connecting things to nature and then the search for a reason within our lives was a very interesting conversation. I think this was really exemplified well in the essay 'Ethan Lockwood'. Pelster connects the chance events of what happened to Lockwood to the weather and thus to nature itself and humans' effect on nature, citing climate change. She in a way is telling us that we are in charge of our own lives in every single way, which I agree with to a certain extent, but I also think that there are many things outside of our control as humans. This is true with our search for the reason behind things that happen, and Pelster's idea that we can use nature to create reason and meaning within our lives. I thought the things that Pelster decided to talk about and discuss within this collection were interesting. She brought together complex human behaviors with our interactions with nature and how we are similar to nature in our desire for reason and connection to the natural world. I think the topics that Pelster decided to write about, such as religion, sexism, misogyny, and our search for meaning and reason. I think that Pelster expertly blends together these topics while also using nature to exemplify these issues and the need for us to better address and blend nature and the natural world into our lives.
I thought Pelster's writing was quite good. I really related to a lot of what she was saying, she was very compelling in what she was trying to say, and I would possibly like to read more from her in the future.

[Athena · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an impulse bookstore purchase that I wanted to like more than I did. I forced myself to read through to the end simply because I had bought the book. Many of the essays have a disturbing colonialist/settler-colonialist perspective as Angela Pelster reproduces and celebrates the way colonialists before her mined lands that weren't theirs, literally and metaphorically, as objects of white/Western knowledge and material with which to remake white/Western subjectivity. Some essays are forced, seemingly written for the sake of producing work. And a few are basically Wikipedia entries rewritten to sound "literary" ... I discovered that when I looked up one of the phenomena she describes. Finally, there is one piece recounting scenes from the life of an indigenous boy at a youth home in which it is not clear that Pelster had consent to turn this boy's life into her story.

There were one or two pieces that I did like, but I really wished Pelster had stuck to her own experiences. She could also benefit from some critical education on colonialism and the production of environmental knowledge. I do not recommend this book.

[Albana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to find nonfiction books on nature that aren't dry/monotonous in tone, and don't anthropomorphize the environment to the point it feels more sensational and less real. With Limber, I found myself wrapped up in the stories, which made the facts palatable and memorable. I felt Pelster wasn't aiming to make a case for trees, instead, she illustrated a tree's presence throughout different forms of life.

This might have been my first anthology of nonfiction essays, but definitely not my last. To me, Pelster's book was refreshingly new with its style - it's either likeable or not, but it's not comparable to anything else I've come across. Can't wait to read more books in this unique genre, and published by Sarabande Books (check them out!).

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing in this is amazing. Here's my favorite sentence, from an essay which touches on the author's time at a Bible college. She's sneak-reading in the college library, an act of sexual rebellion against the expected role as good wife: "All those Bible concordances watching on with greedy eyes, moans pressed between their pages like dried flowers."

[John Bellinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tremendous little book of well-written essays, most of which are connected to a history of trees. A wide- ranging book by a very talented writer.

[Jeff Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to abandon on p. 55 (ILL book due). Wide-ranging but so smart and controlled in their structure and delivery. Really stunning how much Pelster packs into each short essay.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short intriguing essays that often left me confused.

[Jennifer Pullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and surprising.

[Kacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, especially the twists of autobiography that crept in half way

[Anna Rohleder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A weird, wonderful and inspiring blend of poetry and essay...

[Rachel Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and powerful collection of essays.

[Randall Rocha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, great book. Good example of what the essay can be, and, perhaps more importantly, what the essay collection can be.

[Brittney Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hidden gem. Absolutely stunning. Disturbing. My kind of read.

[abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think about “Meditations on a Tree Frog” often. There are few things that stick with me the way that piece does. It’s honest and brutal and I love it.

The whole collection is moving. It leaps from the page and burrows itself into your veins.

[Colette J · Rating 3 out of 5]

sort of like intergenerational family stories, i feel like musings on trees are a cheat code for brilliance.

[Blake Williams]

Annie Dillard with less philosophy & her punches pulled.