Book Review: ‘No Less Strange or Wonderful’ by A. kendra Greene

NO LESS STRANGE OR WONDERFUL: Essays in Curiosity, by A. Kendra Greene

“It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world,” A. Kendra Greene writes in “No Less Strange or Wonderful,” her new book of essays.

“Sheer material, corporeal existence, all its textures and interactions, what any of it is and how any of it works — is there anything more stunning? It is enough to witness it well, minutely, enthralled. And surely that is enough, more than enough. I’d bet my life on it, yes. But the essay cannot help itself. It wants also for that very fact, that insight, that mechanism so keenly seen in itself to be exactly that and be a symbol, an allegory, a metaphor, another meaning, too.”

“No Less Strange or Wonderful” is a collection marked by this insistence on the genre’s ability to reveal, in both metaphor and fact, what those of us who are not Greene are presumably blowing past as we hurtle through our days. Her first book, 2020’s “The Museum of Whales You Will Never See,” which took a tour of Iceland’s 265 museums, traveled similar territory.

Here, she concerns herself with the theft of ivory-billed woodpeckers from museums, the unsung qualities of wasps, the Texas power outage of February 2021 and an annual balloon twisters’ convention. An armadillo or four trundle by; giant sloths, monotremes and giraffes make appearances, too. Scattered throughout, in homage to medieval bestiaries, are Greene’s sketches of these and other creatures, along with engravings, etchings and lithographs.