Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New
Southwest is Mary Sojourner’s timely and occasionally
quirky reckoning of loss and resilience. Throughout these 50
vignettes, some new, some previously published, the Flagstaff,
Ariz., author and High Country News contributor
weaves personal stories into a compelling history of her hometown’s
growing pains.
Bonelight’s intimate musings on
environmental destruction and greed strike tones both elegiac and
hopeful, answering the promise of “ruin” and “grace” in the
subtitle. New readers will delight in Sojourner’s lyrical prose; a
particularly fine rhapsody captures the precise moment when a
desert obsidian flow morphs into a rock serpent under the cold full
moon.
Sojourner writes in sympathy with those
struggling to protect beloved places, from wilderness to local
bookstores, and to avenge places scarred by the fangs of
“compromise.” In “Super Downtown,” Sojourner takes readers along on
her afternoon rounds to repair jewelry, buy food, browse at the
newsstand, all the while chatting up proprietors like the old
friends they’ve become. Then she slyly challenges Wal-Mart,
“slouching like a rough beast” toward Flagstaff, to match the
intimacy, value and efficiency of the Downtown
economy.
In “Wild Heart,” she crows over hard-won
victories in battles against monied interests for whom a little
more (land, profit, pollution) is never enough * but cautions that
many Southwestern environmental battles demand the fortitude to
outlive the enemy. If you lose, says Sojourner, never forget. And
nurture hope, focusing it onto the next beloved place … and the
next.
Bonelight is by turns dark, curmudgeonly
and inspiring.
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace
in the New Southwest, by Mary Sojourner. University of
Nevada Press, 2002. Hardcover: $21.95. 144 pages.
Copyright © 2002 HCN and Renee Guillory
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Bonelight: Ruin and Grace.
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