Bogs are large close now. Fashion designers are dipping couture successful peat; memes connected Instagram connection assistance choosing your bog witch name. Internationally bestselling authors are (figuratively) mining wetlands for inspiration.
The bog and its cousins the swamp and marsh person ever occupied a definite niche successful fashionable culture, but much precocious these landscapes are enjoying broader appeal. I deliberation it has to bash with the mystique of these spaces. In a satellite riven by antiauthoritarian backsliding and polluted with AI slop, there’s thing seductive astir the thought of retreating to a wild, unnavigable spot wherever nary 1 tin travel you—because you’ll beryllium submerged up to your eyeballs.
While I cannot successful bully conscience urge really climbing into a bog, I person done a batch of bog-related speechmaking successful the past fewer years. Since my caller Bog Queen came retired (and is present retired successful paperback), I’ve been incapable to permission bogs behind, and I haven’t had to, due to the fact that I recovered myself successful the midst of a boggy lit boom. The books beneath volition fulfill your bog witch cravings, portion besides reminding you of the real-world value of bogs arsenic bulwarks against clime change, cradles of biodiversity, and keepers of ancestral memory.
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Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role successful the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx
Do you privation to larn the quality betwixt a fen, a bog, and a swamp? Do you privation to larn it from Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx, the adept successful evoking landscapes from Newfoundland to Wyoming? If so, hole yourself: Proulx, arsenic she enters her ninth decade, is nary excessively pleased with the mode humans person stewarded the world’s wetlands. May her rage and disappointment animate you.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister
An eerie fable that seems to instrumentality spot crossed and extracurricular of time, The Bog Wife is already a classical of the modern bog-core genre. This communicative of a West Virginia household with a precise antithetic contented has notes of Edward Gorey and Rebecca, but Chronister creates a satellite each her own, its mossy acheronian illuminated by flashes of humor.
North by Seamus Heaney
This postulation contains 4 of Heaney’s celebrated bog poems, inspired by Iron Age bodies preserved successful Irish peat (and by the enactment of archaeologist P.V. Glob). I person a analyzable narration to these poems; I don’t really emotion “Bog Queen,” which inspired my book’s title. I do, however, similar “The Grauballe Man,” with its evocative simile and metaphor: “As if helium had been poured/ successful tar, helium lies/ connected a pillow of turf/ and seems to weep/ the achromatic stream of himself.”
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
If, aft immersing yourself successful bogs, you find yourself wanting to larn much astir swamps and different wetlands, look nary further than Forest Euphoria. In this emotion missive to the landscapes of New York state, Kaishian reveals the kaleidoscopic complexity of sex and sexuality successful the plant, fungal, and carnal worlds. Forest Euphoria contains invaluable proposal connected however to beryllium successful nature; it besides has immoderate mind-blowing facts astir eels.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
In Cusk’s archetypal caller aft the blockbuster Outline trilogy, a pistillate invites an creator to enactment astatine her location connected a marsh, and things unravel from there. This publication is somewhat divisive among Cusk-heads. I, however, emotion it, not slightest for its mounting connected the watery borderline of the world.
On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice by Ryan Emanuel
A Lumbee hydrologist and prof astatine Duke University, Emanuel charts the past of Robeson County, North Carolina, done its waters and wetlands. The watery ecosystems of the region are location to the Indigenous Lumbee people, and inextricably tied to their identity, Emanuel writes—yet they are nether changeless menace from mill farming, petroleum extraction, and unscrupulous improvement and excavation. Writing astir Iron Age bog bodies made maine deliberation a batch astir the morals of archaeological enactment connected quality burial sites; Emanuel’s accounts of Lumbee burial mounds laid discarded by settler researchers is simply a reminder that technological advancement has served, excessively often, arsenic an excuse for the theft and demolition of Indigenous remains.
Bog Myrtle by Sid Sharp
A representation publication for bog fans of each ages, Bog Myrtle follows 2 sisters with precise antithetic approaches to quality and life. When Beatrice, the bully sister, knits a magical sweater from spider silk, the 2 embark connected an escapade with astonishing lessons connected conservation and labour relations. The communicative is elevated by its weird and beauteous illustrations of spiders connected strike, wood creatures some earthy and supernatural, and a bog that is always, ever watching.
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Bog Queen by Anna North is present disposable successful paperback from Bloomsbury Publishing.
English (US) ·