Praise for Mountain Time
"In Mountain Time, Renata Golden writes that mountains create a "constant hum" connecting the very core of the earth to our own skin. She interweaves stories from her own life with riveting accounts about the Apache and Irish, yucca and Lehmann's love grass, kangaroo rats and leopard frogs who have made a home somewhere and sometime in the complex topography of the southwestern borderland she loves. Golden's gorgeous, instructive collection is the guidebook we need now."
- Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
"With her thought-provoking debut essay collection, Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, Renata Golden grounds us in place and explores transformative relationships with the human and nonhuman community of the Chiricahuas. Golden encounters longtime ranchers, prairie dogs, leopard frogs, snakes, bluebirds, ants, and a special greyhound. These transporting essays take us on journeys of thought and emotion, and will give you a new lens to see the world, and you'll be grateful for that."
- Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods
"In this luminous collection, Renata Golden offers us an un-easy love story: with birds and people, mountains and family, history and place. Elegantly researched and exquisitely crafted, these essays have a depth and range that will delight and, yes, astonish."
- Susan Fox Rogers, author of Learning the Birds, editor of When Birds Are Near
"With a wonderful mix of history, memory, observation, imagination, and wit, Renata Golden leads us into a landscape that is both stark in its harshness and delightful in it details. Mountain Time reaches from the personal to the universal, opening our eyes, refreshing our senses, and making a home in our hearts. It's an absorbing book, a remarkably good read."
- Gregory Nobles, author of John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman
"Renata Golden's Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment would be at home with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Or, best, with Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, for humility and listening and deep awareness of multiple stories and voices. But these gemlike sentences are Golden's own, and they woo me into an affair with a place I've never been. Fierce and beguiling, funny and brave, this is a book about love: how to love a place where you find yourself a visitor, and how to love the life you've won for yourself."
- Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire