With The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums, Amy Leach (Things That Are) takes readers on a playful, rigorous, mind-bending romp through human nature, the natural world, spirituality and more. Her perfectly singular voice sings the most surprising notes in an imaginative blend of silliness and seriousness.
This sophomore collection of 23 essays opens with the title piece, in which the narrator welcomes all 20 quintillion animals to the Everybody Ensemble. Leach glories in lists of the unlikely, the weird and the underappreciated: "speckled and plain, perfect and imperfect, indigo-feathered, green-skinned, orange-toed, squashed of face, cracked of shell, miniature of heart, young as ducklings, old as hills, everybody raise your sweet and scrapey, bangy, twangy, sundry, snorty voices." Leach is adept at wordplay, but her writing goes much deeper than that, wondering and speculating at larger questions. In "The Wanderer," she considers how to critique the extravaganza show called Earth. The artist of this show has strengths (facility and versatility), but "imagination unchecked can result in a mishmash." If only "we could just establish the genre, whether this is supposed to be comedy or tragedy or romance or what," we could make sense of the effort.
Don't be misled by her joyful absurdity or wit with words: Leach is deadly serious in her questioning of the cosmos, Earth's composer and whether "even with all the troubles of our time, maybe it can still be fun to be a frog." She is smart, effervescent, earnest and funny. Her voice is perfectly unmistakable, her themes expansive; her prose glitters. The Everybody Ensemble is a revelation. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia