RELEASED FALL 2023

ZOO WORLD: ESSAYS

Winner of The Journal Non/Fiction Prize in 2022 from The Ohio State University / Mad Creek Books Imprint.

“Mary Quade is like a girl-guide transcendentalist. She has an unquenchable thirst for natural history—ducklings, milkweed, snake farms—and an unflinching eye for environmental crime. In prose that is like fleshed-out poetry, she elevates the humble and brings great concepts down to earth. Whether at home in Ohio or on an adventure in Michoacán, Vietnam, or the Galápagos, Quade is excellent company. Zoo World is a book to savor.” —Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“In these stunning and urgent explorations, largely about the (im)balance between the human and nonhuman worlds, Quade writes with the precision of a researcher, the lyricism of a poet (which she is), and a selfless compassion. This extraordinary menagerie of essays is not to be missed.” —Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

“Mary Quade is a collector—of insects and injured ducks, of images and memories and facts. Whether wandering a zoo in Vietnam, a beach by Tortuga Bay, some industrial no-man’s-land in Cleveland, or her own backyard, she gathers into her sentences a great many bright and broken findings that, arranged into these artful essays, lovingly illuminate this bright and broken world.” —Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck and The Inner Coast

“A wild ride of a book about the animals in whose midst we live, the animals we eat, and the animals we are—taking us swiftly round the curves and hauling us up each steep ascent before the exhilarating, inevitable plunge that follows.” —Michelle Herman, The Journal Non/Fiction Prize judge and author of Close-Up

“Quade, a poet and creative writing instructor, presents a mixture of travel memoir, philosophical meditation, and environmental ethics class, pondering the many ways she and all of us walk through the world. Her captivating first essay packs a familiar punch, as the author discusses catastrophic oil spills, but the real meat of the chapter is the personal saga of how Quade tried to rescue her own ducklings on her farm. Throughout the book, the author creates similar narrative patterns, relating the larger natural world with her smaller inner one. Birds, snakes, monkeys, monarch butterflies, and numerous other animals move within the text, each reflecting some facet of the relationship between humans and animals… She writes to alert readers about certain issues related to nature (“a fluttery term”) or current affairs but also to connect with them.” —Kirkus Reviews (read full review here)