Sarabande Books

152 pages, $15.95

Review by Mieke Eerkens

In Syracuse, New York, there is an artist, and his art is trees. His masterpiece is the Tree of 40 Fruits, which is exactly what it says it is. Painstakingly, the artist has grafted up to 40 varieties of fruit, chosen for the specific shade of their blossoms, onto one trunk. That trunk feeds the 40 limbs that grow from it. In the spring, the tree bursts into a balanced, integrated mosaic of color. It is a thing of beauty.

So too, is the tree-themed essay collection, Limber, the debut book from Angela Pelster, a 2012 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Like the varieties blooming on the Tree of 40 Fruits, Pelster manipulates individual essays with a deft hand into a singular collection that avoids feeling forced or thematically trite, which, let’s face it, is a certain danger when a writer chooses to write around the construct of a central image. Pelster side-steps that danger by self reflexively winking at her own subjective hand in constructing and exploiting that thematic scaffolding to explore a variety of other issues. For example, Pelster announces the book’s intentions metaphorically at the end of the short introductory essay, “By Way of Beginning,” which recounts the story of a man who plays cross-sections of a tree on a record player: “The rings are a memory of what the seasons brought and what the tree made of it…[E]ven a tree will only tell the story it wants to tell.” Continue reading →