"Handbook for fighting alienation"
Raechel Anne Jolie wrote a really nice blurb for the front of my new book, Wild Horse Shit. (The blurb is below the photo of Raechel here.) You can preorder the book here.
Raechel and I became friends last year after doing a couple readings together on the endless kind of ill-advised tour I did. I think she’s great and her writing will knock you on your ass, if you’ve got any sense.
She’s got an excellent memoir out (Rust Belt Femme) and a new book on its way.
Keep an eye out for that and definitely follow her here on Substack.
She’s one of the real ones.
“Mary Oliver suspects that prayer is a type of paying attention. Simone Weill asserts this: ‘attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.’ Adam Gnade, better than any writer alive, pays attention. In his latest autofiction, Wild Horse Shit, we follow a man who has chosen connection over consumption, and in the process has chosen a way of moving through the world that requires a sacred observation. Gnade is reverent in his writing: every person he describes (and every sunset too) involves the kind of detail that only love allows. Through adventures in bars and laundromats, backyards and protests, Gnade offers a sort of handbook for fighting alienation, for refusing to tune out by tuning towards each other. Juxtaposed to genocide and ecocide and AI slop, this wisdom is urgent. In the pulsing attention at the heartbeat of Gnade’s prose, this book is exactly the prayer we need.” -Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme
