The Rock Cycle
The past is a living thing, palpable as the weather. In this collection of essays, Kevin Honold explores themes of history and its fading significance in modern American life. "Remembrance is morbid, unprofitable," he writes. "It’s impractical, impolite in certain company." These words remind us that maintaining a sense of the historical past is crucial to maintaining one’s humanity in the face of our often dehumanizing political and economic systems. The Rock Cycle delves into memory and into the spaces of history, especially the deserts of the American Southwest. This landscape provides a stage, stripped of all distraction, where a person comes face to face with themselves. With contemplations on religions, philosophies, works of literature, and the land, Honold examines what it means to be oneself within the world.
The Rock Cycle: Essays is a literary, geological, and historical achievement that should not be missed.
This book is filled with the deliberations of thinkers who refused to be held cheap and hold cheap. Their imagination took them over the edge of history and into something else, something that is history and is not history, where fidelity to the givenness of things does not become an idolatry of the necessary. And Honold (somehow) weaves these ancient imaginations into preternatural essays of his own, strange alchemies of syntactical discipline, reckless curiosity, and impetuous generosity.
A haunting and intimate and richly evocative book.
Kevin Honold is also the author of Men as Trees Walking. His poetry and essays have appeared in the Hudson Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Antioch Review, Vallum, and Image. He is a veteran of the First Gulf War and a former Peace Corps volunteer and now teaches in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
King Oedipus
Light Discipline
The Cloud of Unknowing
Hell on Ducks
A Brief History of the Huron
Winter in the Capital
Spring Arrives in the Gobi
A Natural History of New Mexico
The Rock Cycle
Verdun
Cycling the Mojave
The Western Terminus
Notes
Works Cited
