The Deep Zoo by Rikki DucornetCoffee House Press, 2015

I liked this collection of fifteen short essays, but probably would have liked it more if I were more familiar with some of the subjects Ducornet is writing about. (I haven’t seen any David Lynch films, for example, and while I appreciated the language and images of “Witchcraft by a Picture,” I also felt a bit lost.) Some themes and interests surface in several essays: writing and what it is that writers do, seeds and origins and beginnings, dreams, seeing, making, beauty. I like the bits where Ducornet is writing about visual art, like when she’s talking about an Egyptian tomb and a painting in it, in “Books of Natural and Unnatural Nature,” or when she’s writing about Margie McDonald’s art (there are pictures of several of McDonald’s “Sea ‘scape” sculptures in the book, which I appreciated). In another essay, Ducornet writes about a novel she wrote that has water as its guiding element, and these two sentences are enough to make me want to read her fiction: “Saturday and pissing vinegar. The old port has vanished in the rain; port and sky and sea all smeared together like a jam of oysters, pearl-grey and viscous” (43).