Annie Connole
The Spring: A Mythic Memoir
(Chin Music Press, Inc., May 2021)
Featured on The New School Alumni’s “Summer Reading List”
Traversing the wild landscapes of the American West, prose and photography combine to create a lucid, dream-like vision of visitations and allegorical animal encounters with Snake, Owl, and Dragonfly, among others. The Spring tells a stirring, elegiac tale of death, love, rebirth, resilience and friendship.
Praise for The Spring
“Sometimes the only way through unbearable grief is to pay attention to everything it illuminates. In this sustained and lyrical examination of life after loss, Annie Connole attunes us to the animals and their interminable mystery. Her words and images, like quiet reveries, lead us from the domestic to the wild, wingbeat to heartbeat, to reveal how, even in our deepest despair, we can listen and look our way into what comes next. Provocative and reassuring, The Spring is like a wide-eyed walk through rich and resonant human and natural worlds.”
— Kimi Eisele, author of The Lightest Object in the Universe
“Annie Connole’s The Spring is a remarkable debut. By turns raw and mystical, steeped in loss but also reconciliation, it is a book that challenges our preconceptions, in regard to content and form. Connole is a poet in essayist’s clothing; her language ripples and burns. Even more, she has an open heart, and she does not hold back. Elliptical, pointed, unrelenting, this is a work of astonishing power.”
— David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles
“Annie Connole’s The Spring shapes an accruing fable with the wellspring of a seer’s vision, and thus out of a devastating, gorgeous, and hailing prose is a work startled and “halted by the openness” of what it witnesses. She writes of the death of the painter, who, carries on, skimming “on shallow ripples of the river, on the glassy eyes of the wolf in the dark.” The dark is what Connole transforms into a lighted path of rising truth, and the wisdom from this solitary eye holds these tender visions close and upheld.”
— Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence
“With this remarkable first book, writer Annie Connole, Montana born and raised, brings us a work of surpassing grace, tenderness, and power… Annie Connole represents a new and compelling voice arising out of the American West…The Spring, illustrated with Connole’s own photographs, is truly a spiritual text, a haunting meditation that can help us to survive our own unbearable losses.”
—High Desert Journal
Read High Desert Journal‘s review of THE SPRING
Read an excerpt from THE SPRING on Alta
Annie Connole shares her recommendations for “What To Read When You Are Visited By Grief” for The Rumpus
Listen to Annie Connole on Skylight Books’s podcast
Annie Connole is an essayist and playwright living in Southern California. She was born and raised in the rocky highlands of Helena, Montana. Annie received a B.A. from The New School where she studied art and philosophy and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of California Riverside – Palm Desert. Her essays have appeared in Writers Resist, zimzum, and The Rumpus.