A. Kendra Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) offers a magical, mind-expanding selection of observations in No Less Strange or Wonderful. Greene employs a delightful, often childlike wonder in this essay collection about discovery. Her perspective is fresh and inventive, open to all possibilities, and the results are surprising and wondrous.
Greene's essays vary in length and take place around the world. "Wild Chilean Baby Pears" considers a crime: in 1979, a museum visitor stole a specimen of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Greene, who has been a museum visitor as well as a museum worker and a teacher, explores this act from several angles. Brief and spellbinding, "The Two Times You Meet the Devil" describes encounters on a country road in Argentina and in a bookstore of unnamed location. "Until It Pops" details a dress made for the author out of balloons, and her experience of traveling to Chicago for Twist and Shout (the annual balloon twisters' convention).
Greene is always present, participating in the action and dialogue, postulating philosophies and understandings. Greene is an artist in several media (book arts, photography, illustration); this collection is illuminated by her own illustrations and images. The scope of her essays (26 in total) is mesmerizing, her language glittering, and her ideas exuberant and profound. She says it best herself: "It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world." As for what we communicate with art: "everything resonant and whole and shining, all at once, perfect, every bell ringing, yes." Yes. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia