Blessing of the Animals

In Brenda Miller's second collection of award-winning essays, the reader is drawn into a conversation on topics ranging from new dogs to old stained glass, from a walk in Portland's Japanese Garden to a sojourn in Jerusalem, from model airplanes to Magic 8 Balls. As in her acclaimed first collection, Season of the Body, Miller leads us on a pilgrimage through her life as a woman driven by spiritual yearning. Together, these essays prompt us to consider how our hard-won abilities to bless others become ways of blessing ourselves.

Brenda Miller

Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002), which was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the co-author, with Suzanne Paola, of the textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2004). She has received five Pushcart Prizes, including one for "Blessing of the Animals" and another for "Raging Waters," both of which appear in this volume. A third of the essays, "Table of Figures," was selected for inclusion in The Best Creative Nonfiction, vol. 3. She serves as the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review, and her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Utne Reader, and Witness, among other journals. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches at Western Washington University.

Reviews

Brenda Miller writes with such extraordinary grace and intimacy that, despite our weariness and fears, we find ourselves falling in love with the world all over again.

—Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness and A Country Called Home

In Blessing of the Animals, a new dog leads Brenda Miller to explore the blurred edges between the physical and the spiritual, to probe the connective tissues of magnetism, memory, and mysticism. Contemplating the process of aging and the dilemmas of desire, she seamlessly fashions an aesthetics in which the human body can be solidly aware of the moment even as it is soaring "on the verge of flight."

—Judith Kitchen, author of Only the Dance and Distance and Direction

In her stunning and compelling collection of essays, Brenda Miller embarks upon "the deliberate, tender restoration of all that can be lost." With a Buddhist's mindfulness, Miller gives everything from model airplanes to Tiffany glass its full measure of attention. Whether writing of Arabs and Israelis or water slides and spewing volcanoes, she embraces the mingled sorrow and joy that comprise—in equal parts—the things of this world she restores through her tender, deliberative prose.

—Sue William Silverman, author of Love Sick

Delicate, elegant, and occasionally devastating, Brenda Miller's essays are helping to set the standard for our generation.

—John D'Agata, author of Halls of Fame

Ordering Information

To purchase Blessing of the Animals by Brenda Miller, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.