One of the most beautiful and moving books I’ve read this year. Toni Jensen, a Métis, describes her relation to the American cultural landscape of violence in a series of essays that are somehow simultaneously outward-focused and deeply personal. These essays move back and forth in time, tracing her peripatetic life as a graduate student and then adjunct professor, but more importantly her dawning understanding about how violence has shaped her life, beginning with the historical theft of Native American land. The male tendency to conquer, control, dominate never stopped with the conquest of a “New” World and now it manifests as an obsession with guns and regular domestic violence and mass shootings. Yet Jensen can still write with love about her abusive father, her partners, her daughter, and most especially the physical landscape she lives in. Her writing makes a painful and complex world somehow one still worth fixing and loving, however intractable it might appear to be.