Synopses & Reviews
In
Wild Delicate Seconds, Charles Finn captures twenty-nine chance encounters with the everyday — and not so everyday — animals, birds, and insects of North America.
There are no maulings or fantastic escapes in Finn's narratives — only stillness and attentiveness to beauty. With profundity, humor, and compassion, Finn pays homage to the creatures we share our world with — from black bears to bumble bees, mountain lions to muskrats — and, in doing so, touches on what it means to be human.
Review
"These brief meditations are as beautiful for what they donʼt say as for what they do. Charles Finn does not pad, overreach, or over-emote. His precision accounts of wildlife encounters summon awe, wonder, and magnificence when those feelings are authentically present, but just as readily summon comedy if the encounter was, as Edward Hoagland once put it, 'like meeting a fantastically dressed mute on the road.' These are not fleeting glances: they are full-on full-bodied face-to-face invocations of the way animals and birds 'speak out by saying precisely nothing,' uncannily propelling us into 'the exact place where the world begins.'"
David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water
About the Author
Charles Finn is editor of High Desert Journal. His writing is published in more than fifty newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Sun, Open Spaces, Northern Lights, Big Sky Journal, and High Country News. He taught English as a foreign language in Hiroshima, Japan; hid out in the woods of British Columbia; and learned the art of deconstruction in Potomac, Montana. Originally from Vermont and a recent resident of Bend, Oregon, he now lives in New Jersey.