missai 's review for:

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

4.0

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[4/5 ⭐️] During the pandemic, I was filled with a profound longing for nature, heightened by my withdrawal from living in a big city for almost a decade. Reading this book reminded me of the pure childlike joy in being surrounded by trees, in dipping your feet in running water. After years of being trapped under skyscrapers and smog, the experience of being in nature borders somewhere between reverence and fetish, a line that Mary Oliver is constantly toeing in her writing. I can feel her desperation to connect to the earth, coupled with a perverseness in the presumption that such a connection is even possible in the modern age. While this collection of essays was very hit or miss for me, it gets 4 stars because my copy is filled with underlines and dog eared pages.