This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature

"Smart, funny, and shot through with aching love, This Is How A Robin Drinks is both a call to action and a balm for the solastalgic heart. This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change the way you see the world and every living thing within it, including yourself." —Margaret Renkl, author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year “Inspiring and full of wonder. These vivid stories combine curiosity, wit, and a keen sense of the many ways that exultation and heartbreak mingle when we look closely at the everyday life of our yards, parks, and cities.”— David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction “Joanna Brichetto is a suburban Thoreau. In fifty-three crisp essays that can be read as daily meditation, she takes us to pocket parks, dead mall parking lots, and concrete canyons in pursuit of little ecological marvels. This collection is essential to understanding the need for widespread habitat protection and restoration and a reminder of the capacity and limits of nature to resist human destruction.”— Georgann Eubanks, author of Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction “It would be hard to imagine a more delightful, engaging, and insightful introduction to urban natural history. Brichetto’s love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck it will go viral and infect us all. Her laugh-out-loud wittiness draws us in for more and reminds us to hit the pause button on our hectic lives as an antidote to the day’s news.”—Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard "Joanna Brichetto loves her native planet—yes, our trashed twenty-first-century world—with passion and eloquence worthy of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard. In her scintillating visions of urban nature, she follows a lost dragonfly through a Goodwill store, peers through a soccer game at the cicadas buzzing around it, and reports that a hummingbird’s heart beats so fast its body hums in her hand—all shared with novelistic detail and poetic precision. Brichetto’s love is not a warm fuzzy thing because this is not a warm fuzzy world. Her passion for nature is lusty, skeptical, disappointed, sacred, profane."—Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond "This is How the Robin Drinks" accomplishes in relatively few, transcendent words more than any in-depth natural history tome ever could, conveying how easy it is to look out for-or, alternatively, overlook-life in the spaces between. Nature needs no embellishment, and Joanna Brichetto’s exquisitely spare, poetic voice is its perfect match, guided by her quest for knowing and grounded in her awareness and compassion for both the human and more-than-human world. She is a gift to the trees, the bees, the bats, the birds and me—as well as anyone else who is looking for microhabitats of hope on a fractured planet. She is my new favorite nature writer.— Nancy Lawson, author of Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature There's power in unusual glimpses of the highways, parking lots, and backyards of urban America. Certified Tennessee Naturalist Brichetto, who shares her nature writing on the website Sidewalk Nature, compiles a series of humorous and educational short essays. "This is my almanac: sketches arranged by season, set in the backyard, the sidewalk, the park, the parking lot, connected by urgent wonder." Brichetto's keen eye peers at cicadas, admires the beauty of a vacant lot with asters growing in pavement cracks, and wonders about the purpose of dandelions—is a dandelion to blow, or is it, as Thoreau mused, "the sun itself in the grass?" Almost anything alive or dead merits Brichetto's curiosity, voiced in cocktail party–worthy chatter on everything from where cotton candy was invented to details of the author's personal life and how her children and husband live with her almost fanatical commitment to urban nature. To learn about maple samaras—those winged seed pods—from Brichetto is to share her devotion to keeping nature safe in our backyards. Barbara Jacobs, Booklist “Joanna Brichetto is a city dweller and master noticer writing bite-size essays from an urban perch that teems with life and litter. She turns her eye equally on human things, plants, and animals, recording the disruptive truth of how we all exist in a single, entangled mosaic. ‘Our world is beautiful as it burns,’ she writes. Read and be enlarged.” — Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Neighbors