Yoke & Feather
Jessie’s new essay collection, Yoke & Feather, releases in November 2024.
“Yoke & Feather is a holy book, sagacious and vulnerable and profound. Van Eerden yearns for a child as she animates scripture as she paddles the Rio Grande as she cleaves the carcass of a deer shot by her new partner in the Appalachian woods. She has reverence for it all.” —Courtney Zoffness (Spilt Milk)
“Moving, brilliant essays that leave you feeling ‘something in you is activated, vowels breathed into your hard, bony consonants.’” —Jessica Jacobs (unalone)
Read an early review in The Brooklyn Rail: “Yoke & Feather…is an entirely convincing paean to the way divine mysteries are made manifest in even the most quotidian details.” And another in Foreword Reviews: “The essays in Yoke & Feather are gorgeous exercises in faith-filled, interconnected being.”
“Readerly, at times virtuosic, always kind, this book’s vulnerability is stunning. There is great pressure on women to doggedly defend their station in life, a kind of secular fundamentalism. Van Eerden, blessedly ‘misfit,’ (like Mary Magdalene, Simone Weil, Ruth, all here) can see both the grace of givenness and the shape of a longed-for child she’ll never hold. I am ready for more literature that moves between OkCupid and Capernaum, aren’t you?”
—Mary Margaret Alvarado, author of American Weather and Hey Folly
Call It Horses
Jessie’s newest novel, Call It Horses, released in March 2021, won the 2019 Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction and was named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES award in general adult fiction.
“Out of these layers comes a book that documents the opening of a mind, showing how an exchange of handwritten words between almost-strangers convinces a young girl that she might contain a valuable and interesting world that is worthy of expression.” —Review by Michelle Bailat-Jones in Necessary Fiction
Read an excerpt in Lit Hub and reviews in Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Southern Literary Review, and New York Journal of Books.
Read interviews with Jessie about Call it Horses by Ellie Paolini in Scoundrel Time and Mesha Maren in Southern Review of Books.
“Call It Horses is so many wonderful things at once: a road novel—three women trying to outrun grief, from the limestone caves of Caudell, West Virginia to the canyons of Palo Duro, Texas; a portrait of the artist as restless skeptic; a meditation on language itself. I know of few writers who write as well as Jessie van Eerden about the sacredness of language, the way it calls forth the world by naming it. Van Eerden doesn’t just write about it; she enacts it formally—the shapeshifting magic of words, the acrobatic possibilities of sentences, the beautiful, yearning, fail and fail better lengths to which we all go to make our minds heard.”
—Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away and The Art of Mystery
The Long Weeping
The Long Weeping, Jessie van Eerden’s collection of portrait essays, released with Orison Books in November 2017, was named winner of the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the essay category.
Read an epistle-review by Caitlin Etherton in Blackbird: “If Charles Wright’s assertion that ‘form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content’ is true for both poetry and prose, then the essays of Jessie van Eerden’s creative nonfiction collection, The Long Weeping, could not have been written in any form less attentive than the portrait. And a review of van Eerden’s book could not have been written in any form less direct than an epistle.”
Read a starred review in Foreword Reviews and a review in River Teeth.
“Jessie van Eerden’s wholehearted essays are acts of ardent and radical comprehension, contending with mysteries and memories that would lead many to declare an impasse, or to employ miniaturizing disdain. Van Eerden is too adventurous a comprehender to be easily thwarted, though, and she is too serious for disdain. In these portrait essays she takes all of her subjects seriously—the ‘Woman with Dog with Mange,’ the concubine shooing the birds away from her sons’ dead bodies, the checkout lady at the Dollar General, as well as her younger self, who at the time felt herself ‘scruffy and insignificant.’ Here is no nefarious regularizing of the past or imposition of ideology; here is the shock of experience—funny, warm, odd, grievous—in a West Virginia childhood, twelfth-century Belgium, or an interior desert where you learn how to love. Like someone fleeing to the desert from supposedly desirable, supposedly enviable things, Jessie van Eerden’s book is ‘mad for something else’ and I was thrilled to follow her.”
—Amy Leach, author of Things That Are
My Radio Radio
My Radio Radio, Jessie van Eerden’s second novel, was released with Vandalia Press, the creative imprint of West Virginia University Press, in April 2016, and was selected for the Top 10 of 2016 by ImageUpdate.
Read a review in Kirkus Reviews which calls the novel “a haunting, original meditation,” and another in ForeWord Reviews:
“Its pages are sharpened by contrasts—between the dull nature of a regimented religious existence, and the colorful needs of a young girl.”
“A book of surprises—surprises that emanate not so much from dramatic action but as a rich consequence of the crafting of character through language. Page after page, the reader is treated to beautifully cadenced, strikingly voiced observations and reflections that shape the poetic sensibility of the coming-of-age narrator, Omi Ruth. The reader reads and keeps reading for the wonder of Omi Ruth’s utterances, for her quirky and tender insights.”
—Karen Brennan, author of little dark and Monsters
Glorybound
Glorybound, Jessie van Eerden’s debut novel, released with WordFarm in 2012, won the 2012 Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize with ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards.
ForeWord reviewer Michelle Anne Schingler said, “Lyrical, heartbreaking, and dazzling in its unobtrusive authenticity, van Eerden’s first novel is an affecting delight.” Read the full review.
Read a novel excerpt online in Memorious: “Stores of Mercy.”
“Jessie van Eerden possesses a visionary’s unswerving gaze and a poet’s ear. Van Eerden fearlessly explores faith as it is borne on the body and carried as curse and blessing both. A redemptive story of scope and miracle, loss and reunion, voice and silence, Glorybound shines with an interior light so fierce and lovely one cannot be anything but utterly astonished.”
—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, People I Wanted to Be, and The Necessary Grace to Fall