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Welcome to the VERANDA Sip & Read Book Club! Each month, we dive in to a book and offer exclusive conversations with the authors behind each tale over on Instagram, along with a perfectly matched cocktail. This month's pick is Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders, a collection of the poet's essays exploring her life through the healing lens of nature. Get caught up on our past book club selections here.
If you’ve been searching for the perfect book with which to welcome the first blush of spring, well, we’re here to remedy that and offer a fitting companion: Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders.
While each essay in World of Wonders can be read on its own (it makes for a great bedtime read, one short essay a night to ponder while you drift to sleep), there’s a larger narrative that unfolds across the span of the book. Nezhukumatathil explores her childhood; trips to visit family in Kerala, India; dating and marriage; becoming a mother and finding her footing as a writer after welcoming her firstborn son; and moving across the country to quench her growing restlessness.
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Each essay is framed by an exploration of something from the natural world: whale sharks with their fairytale origin story (“the spots on his back look like a whole city of light, where everyone is always awake, trying to remember the simple sweet memory of soil”); the astonishingly pungent corpse flower, with an almost human-like temperature; the sly movements of touch-me-nots.
Nezhukumatathil's training as a poet shines through her descriptions and the details she coaxes to the page. The essays collected here are calls to the heart through the lens of the natural world and all its glorious mysteries: the innocent and heartrending questions she chronicles as her sons search for birds on National Audubon Bird Count Day, the painful shock and hopeful longing of a missing cockatiel, the aching memory of fresh citrus from the garden can bring. Nezhukumatathil’s limitless amazement at the natural world bids us to do the same, to examine ourselves among the new blooms and pollen-dusted paths of the gardens and parks outside our homes.
Yet Nezhukumatathil doesn’t sit idle on just light subjects. In one essay, she explores what it felt like to be one of the only brown people in her western New York town, the casual barbs of racism, and the ways both have shaped her. Her description of the newt, with its electromagnetic homing beacon, and her own realignment in Oxford, Mississippi (where she is now a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi), show just how deft a hand she has for weaving her personal journey with the fascinating quirks of nature.
In VERANDA’s March/April issue, the magazine asks if gardens can save us. The answer is here, amid Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, and the answer is yes, if we let it. World of Wonders contains within its pages a natural tenderness—a trait the world could use more of—and what better way to refill yourself with it this spring than with her wise, wondering words.
Join us March 29 at 12 noon EST when VERANDA Editor-in-Chief Steele Thomas Marcoux chats live on Instagram with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and takes your questions. Until then, read along with us by picking up your own copy at your local bookshop or online!
VERANDA SIP & READ BOOK CLUB FOR MARCH 2021
Milkweed Editions World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Milkweed Editions World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Selection: World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (available via local booksellers, Amazon, or Bookshop)
Start reading with us March 1.
Send Aimee your questions via VERANDA's Instagram Stories.
Tune in to Instagram as Aimee answers your questions and chats live about World of Wonders on March 29 at 12 noon EST.
