A review by jnzllwgr
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

Super niche non-fiction book from a novelist who is writing/reflecting about writing and the influences to her thinking.  I cannot recall how I came across this or why I picked up other than the first section on “Plants” touched on ecology and the landscape with big mentions of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach books and Timothy Morton’s concepts of Dark Ecology and Hyperobjects.  There are some distinctly female oriented views on the books topics (‘Plants’, ‘Planets’, and ‘Bleed’) and that offered up some powerful, persuasive notions of women as receptors — of the good and bad — and the body becomes the site for dealing with these issues. As the husband of a breast-cancer survivor, I’m very sensitive to this notion that the civilization’s literally high toxicity writ itself large within women’s bodies. Those observations by Wilk spurred me to purchase my next three reading projects, so we’ll see where that rabbit hole takes me!