This is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature
by Joanna Brichetto
Trinity University Press, 9/24/24
9781595342997 paper, 19.95
9781595343000 ebook, 14.99
Where to buy: Parnassus Books, The Bookshop (Nashville), Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Trinity Univ. Press, Wild Ones Reading List at Bookshop.org.
Joanna Brichetto is a late-blooming naturalist with an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.
Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us: the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection investigate and celebrate nature—just as it is—in the yard, on the sidewalk, at the park, the parking lot.
“Nature is not here just to teach you or cure you or remind you of something about yourself, though you can, of course, learn and heal and remember—which we all desperately need to do—but that’s not why this bee is biting a circle from the redbud leaf, or why the pokeweed is blooming, or why a cottontail is stretching and rolling in the dirt by the porch where rain never reaches.”
(from “Why it is Good to Go Outside Even When You Feel Like Hell,” p. 50)
Praise
“Smart, funny, and shot through with aching love, This Is How A Robin Drinks is both a call to action and a balm for the solastalgic heart. This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change the way you see the world and every living thing within it, including yourself.”
—Margaret Renkl, author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
“Inspiring and full of wonder. These vivid stories combine curiosity, wit, and a keen sense of the many ways that exultation and heartbreak mingle when we look closely at the everyday life of our yards, parks, and cities.”
—David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
“It would be hard to imagine a more delightful, engaging, and insightful introduction to urban natural history. Brichetto’s love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck it will go viral and infect us all. Her laugh-out-loud wittiness draws us in for more and reminds us to hit the pause button on our hectic lives as an antidote to the day’s news.”
—Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
“This is How a Robin Drinks accomplishes in relatively few, transcendent words more than any in-depth natural history to me ever could, conveying how easy it is to look out for—or, alternatively, overlook—life in the spaces between. Nature needs no embellishment, and Joanna Brichetto’s exquisitely spare, poetic voice is its perfect match, guided by her quest for knowing and grounded in her awareness and compassion for both the human and more-than-human world. She is a gift to the trees, the bees, the bats, the birds and me—as well as anyone else who is looking for microhabitats of hope on a fractured planet. She is my new favorite nature writer.”
—Nancy Lawson, author of The Humane Gardener and Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature.
“Joanna Brichetto is a suburban Thoreau. In fifty-two crisp essays that can be read as daily meditation, she takes us to pocket parks, dead mall parking lots, and concrete canyons in pursuit of little ecological marvels. This collection is essential to understanding the need for widespread habitat protection and restoration and a reminder of the capacity and limits of nature to resist human destruction.”
—Georgann Eubanks, author of Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction
“Joanna Brichetto is a city dweller and master noticer writing bite-size essays from an urban perch that teems with life and litter. She turns her eye equally on human things, plants, and animals, recording the disruptive truth of how we all exist in a single, entangled mosaic. ‘Our world is beautiful as it burns,’ she writes. Read and be enlarged.”
—Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Neighbors
“Joanna Brichetto loves her native planet—yes, our trashed twenty-first-century world—with passion and eloquence worthy of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard.”
—Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
—Red Canary Magazine: (excerpt)
“… A reader doesn’t have to get too far into this book before appreciating that one of Brichetto’s many gifts is that she not only stops and smells the roses in her path, but happily spends time — like, hours — enjoying the dramas and occasional comedies that unfold inside those and other flowers, in cracks in the driveway, on a trip to the store, anywhere and everywhere, all at once.”
“…Throughout her essays, she shapes images that flicker behind our eyelids long after we’ve closed the book — scenes vivid enough that for a moment a reader can imagine that they happened in her own life, before remembering that, wait, no, they occurred in Brichetto’s.”
“Knowing how to start an essay is as key as knowing how and when to stop. Brichetto gets it, and with that knowledge, she fashions essays that read like dispatches from a quirky, smart, curious friend — no small feat, as every writer seeking their unique voice knows.”
—Benedict Cosgrove, Red Canary Magazine: “Dragonflies, Bats and Hackberry Trees, Oh My! Joanna Brichetto’s Urban Wilderness,“
—Booklist review
“There’s power in unusual glimpses of the highways, parking lots, and backyards of urban America. Certified Tennessee Naturalist Brichetto, who shares her nature writing on the website Sidewalk Nature, compiles a series of humorous and educational short essays. “This is my almanac: sketches arranged by season, set in the backyard, the sidewalk, the park, the parking lot, connected by urgent wonder.” Brichetto’s keen eye peers at cicadas, admires the beauty of a vacant lot with asters growing in pavement cracks, and wonders about the purpose of dandelions—is a dandelion to blow, or is it, as Thoreau mused, “the sun itself in the grass?” Almost anything alive or dead merits Brichetto’s curiosity, voiced in cocktail party–worthy chatter on everything from where cotton candy was invented to details of the author’s personal life and how her children and husband live with her almost fanatical commitment to urban nature. To learn about maple samaras—those winged seed pods—from Brichetto is to share her devotion to keeping nature safe in our backyards.”
—Barbara Jacobs, Booklist (link)
—Chapter16 review
“Nashville resident and naturalist Joanna Brichetto defends her urban home, arguing it is a perfect spot to fall in love with the wonder of insects, birds, trees, and plants. If she’s the attorney in this case, consider her book This is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature a powerful opening statement…
Her commitment to and appreciation of nature wherever it’s found and just as it is, ticks and all, is a breath of fresh air, a beautiful reminder that humanity need not always be the center of things.”
—Sara Beth West, review at Chapter16.org: “Protecting What We Love: This is How a Robin Drinks Makes a Case for Urban Nature.” (link)
—BookPage starred review
Excerpt: “Brichetto—a former BookPage contributor —believes that “by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are.” Fortunately, “nature is all around”—and in this almanac organized by season, she encounters and explores nature in places we expect, like parks and gardens and birdbaths. But what about thrift stores, grocery bags and abandoned mall parking lots?”
…This Is How a Robin Drinks is sure to trigger an uptick in meanderings—urban or rural, day or night—suffused with new appreciation for and a renewed determination to preserve our endlessly fascinating yet increasingly vulnerable environment. And not a moment too soon; after all, Brichetto writes, “Spoiler alert: nature’s best hope is us.”
—Linda M. Castellitto, BookPage, link
—Cool Green Science (Nature Conservancy blog) (link)
The celebration of urban nature is a welcome trend in nature writing and This Is How a Robin Drinks is one of the best in this subgenre. Joanna Brichetto notes in one chapter that “I hunt for marvels that tolerate intolerable conditions.” She knows that a curious naturalist finds marvels anywhere, “in the backyard, the sidewealk, the park, the parking lot, connected by urgent wonder.”
That wonder is apparent throughout this fine collection of essays, whether Brichetto is contemplating a hawk on a church steeple or the plants that poke out between sidewalk cracks. I particularly appreciate her attention to the flora that lives on the edges, the gingko trees and backyard sunflowers and moss growing on buildings. Her essay “At a Red Light on Music Row” is one of my favorite essays on trees I’ve ever read (and it’s all-too-relatable for this backyard naturalist).
–Matthew L. Miller
SIDEWALK NATURE 