The beautiful seamlessness between mother and daughter, giant tree and place, shyness and safety, illuminates the potent transfiguration found within these essays.
A sound, she later writes, that she now makes as she walks to class. The catalpa tree, like her mother, is a recurring character in her life and also a gateway to sensorial memory, the “confident clickety-clack” of heels. But then I remember the confident clickety-clack of my mother’s heels as she walked home from work with me and my sister-when people would stare at us but my mother didn’t seem to mind or notice.” “On campus, when I pass the giant catalpa tree, I think of that shy sixth grader who was so nervous when people stared. These essays jump around in time, placing Nezhukumatathil at various ages in Kansas, Arizona, Ohio, New York, and eventually Mississippi, a home she describes as her “new geography.” In the first essay (“Catalpa Tree”), we encounter the ecology and physiology of this large, deciduous tree-its “creamy blossoms” and giant leaves that could “cover my entire face if I ever needed them again.” She elaborates: She explains, “It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time.” Creatures big and small have offered instruction as well as consolation during periods of displacement and episodes of discrimination in her life and Nezhukumatathil’s thirst for the unknown, and sometimes unexplainable, is contagious. The poet Joy Harjo writes, “It’s possible to understand the world from studying a leaf.” Nezhukumatathil demonstrates how she has come to understand the world and her life through deep inquiry of astonishments, like comb jellies, narwhals, and dragon fruit. Now, in this first book of prose, she explores the roots of her own ecopoetic sensibilities and the formative flora and fauna that have shaped her identity as a writer, mother, and daughter of a Filipino mother and Malayali Indian father navigating life in America.
As an accomplished poet and English professor, Nezhukumatathil is already a well-known voice in contemporary poetry. In World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil sings praise and scours old wounds in this vivid and provocative essay collection.
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