About this item
In the bestselling tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Helen MacDonald's H Is for Hawk, a stunning, inspirational memoir from an award-winning poet who ventures into the wilderness to seek answers to life's big questions and finds her way back after losing everything she thought she needed.During a difficult time, Karen Auvinen flees to a primitive cabin in the Rockies to live in solitude as a writer and to embrace all the beauty and brutality nature has to offer. When a fire incinerates every word she has ever written and all of her possessions - except for her beloved dog Elvis, her truck, and a few singed artifacts - Karen embarks on a heroic journey to reconcile her desire to be alone with her need for community. In the evocative spirit of works by Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Mary Oliver, Karen's rich and compulsively readable memoir is as much an inward as it is an outward pilgrimage. Her pursuit of solace and salvation by shedding trivial ties and living in close harmony with nature, along with her account of finding community and love, is sure to resonate with all of us who long for meaning and deeper connection. Rough Beauty is a luminous, lyric exploration of and homage to her forty seasons in the mountains, embracing the unpredictability and grace of living intimately with the forces of nature while making peace with her own wildness.
About the Author
Karen Auvinen is a poet, mountain woman, dog lover, lifelong westerner and writer. Her body of work traverses the intersections of landscape and place, examining what it means to live deeply and voluptuously, and has appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, LitHub and numerous literary journals. Karen is the winner of two Academy of American Poets Awards and her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She earned her MA in Poetry from the University of Colorado, under the mentorship of Lucia Berlin, and her PhD in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Past gigs include storyteller, editor, book buyer, rural postal route driver, caterer, clinic assistant, landscaper, summer camp director and guest chef. She lives in Colorado with the artist Greg Marquez, their dog River and Dottie the Cat, and teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder. More at karenauvinen.com or on her blog: rougherbeauty.com
