Hey there, just wanted to let everyone know that as part of a Winter Sale, my publisher, Rain Chain Press, is offering FREE SHIPPING on my book, After Life as a Human.
Advance Praise for After Life as a Human
“In Laura Valeri’s new and beautifully-written collection of linked essays, she transports us to Dog Island, a remote paradise-of-sorts, seeking solitude and peace amid the undisturbed flora and fauna. Braiding lyrical travelogue and Dillard-esque meditation, and filtered through interrogations into history and mythology, After Life as a Human becomes a profound engagement of the rapaciousness of late-stage capitalism, and the delicacy of a natural world threatened by industry and climate change. Valeri’s powers of observation and environmental responsibility are on full display, and they accumulate here into a Walden for the 21st century.”
-Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa
“Looking for refuge where people “let down by the rat race could get some quiet time for reflection,” Laura Valeri and her husband Joel rent a cottage on remote, primeval Dog Island, home to ten humans and two dogs. With a journalist’s observational skills and the heart of a poet, she paints a stark and lovely portrait of a Gulf Coast wilderness few of us will ever see. The story engrosses us with funny accounts of pelicans, the “street kids” of seabirds. It stuns us with a litany of devastating storms. It touches us with an aching meditation on the death of a loon. After Life as a Human is a timely, vital contemplation of the mutability of the wild and our own frail impermanence.”
James Lough – author of This Ain’t No Holiday Inn
“Laura Valeri is writing about one of my favorite places on earth, the wild and deeply storied Gulf Coast of Florida. Here she describes — in scenic, confident, and refreshingly honest prose — falling in love with a place that is on the front lines of the climate crisis. The book is at once about love, grief, and the transformation that happens when one’s heart opens to wildness.”
Janisse Ray – author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
“This compact and lyrical book allows the reader to join Valeri on a remote getaway to Dog Island, a personal journey that highlights the fragility and enduring impact of the coast as its future shifts before our eyes.”
Sonya Huber – author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
Author | Laura Valeri 