Announcing The Spring

From Chin Music Press

Traversing the wild landscapes of the American West, prose and photography combine to create a lucid, dream-like vision of visitations and allegorical animal encounters with Snake, Owl, and Dragonfly, among others. The Spring tells a stirring, elegiac tale of death, love, rebirth, and transformation.

Announcements

The Spring made the list: Best of 2020-2021: Nonfiction Books / Entropy Magazine.

Buy the Book

The Spring is available for purchase at local bookstores and online through Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Chin Music Press.

Events

Upcoming

• Desert Split Open Presents Justine Chan in Conversation with Annie Connole, The Firehouse, Joshua Tree, CA, May 23rd, 6pm, More info and RSVP Here

• High Desert Library Book Club, May book selection, The Firehouse, Joshua Tree, CA, Sunday, May 28th, 6pm, Open to the public

Watch and Listen to Past Events Online

• Town Hall Seattle, Launch Event with Frances McCue

  • Watch HERE.

• Desert Split Open Presents… Annie Connole

  • Watch HERE.

• Skylight Books, Skylit Podcast, May 24.

  • Listen HERE.

• The Write Question, Montana Public Radio and podcast

  • Listen HERE.

• Montana Book Festival, Debut Truths: Three Authors Debut Memoirs in and of the Wild, Panelist.

  • Watch HERE.

Press and Reviews

Local Author’s “Mythic Memoir” Explores Transformation after Suicide, The Desert Sun, by Greg Archer, July 24, 2022

“Annie Connole’s The Spring: A Mythic Memoir,” High Desert Journal, Review by Rick Newby, May 1, 2021

Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Montana Book Round-up, Review by Aaron Parrett, Autumn 2021 (print only)

Further Reading

• “Wolf / Lone Wolf” an excerpt from The Spring featured in Alta Journal

• “What to Read When You are Visited by Grief,” an essay and list of book recommendations by Annie Connole, The Rumpus, May 2021.

• The art of Devin Leonardi

Praise for The Spring

"Annie Connole's The Spring is a remarkable debut. By turns raw and mystical, steeped in loss but also reconciliation, it is a book that challenges our preconceptions, in regard to content and form. Connole is a poet in essayist's clothing; her language ripples and burns. Even more, she has an open heart, and she does not hold back. Elliptical, pointed, unrelenting, this is a work of astonishing power."

— David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles

“Annie Connole’s The Spring shapes an accruing fable with the wellspring of a seer’s vision, and thus out of a devastating, gorgeous, and hailing prose is a work startled and “halted by the openness” of what it witnesses. She writes of the death of the painter, who, carries on, skimming “on shallow ripples of the river, on the glassy eyes of the wolf in the dark.” The dark is what Connole transforms into a lighted path of rising truth, and the wisdom from this solitary eye holds these tender visions close and upheld.”

— Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence

“Sometimes the only way through unbearable grief is to pay attention to everything it illuminates. In this sustained and lyrical examination of life after loss, Annie Connole attunes us to the animals and their interminable mystery. Her words and images, like quiet reveries, lead us from the domestic to the wild, wingbeat to heartbeat, to reveal how, even in our deepest despair, we can listen and look our way into what comes next. Provocative and reassuring, The Spring is like a wide-eyed walk through rich and resonant human and natural worlds."

— Kimi Eisele, author of The Lightest Object in the Universe