Sound Like Trapped Thunder

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Essays. Environmental Studies. Jessica Lind Peterson's debut essay collection, SOUND LIKE TRAPPED THUNDER, is the winner of the 2020 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, selected by Jenny Boully. In essays on subjects ranging from seahorse mating rituals to an urgent letter addressing a grizzly bear, from a wounded hummingbird to an old woman following the call of a lonely whale, Jessica Lind Peterson explores tensions between domesticity and wildness, often discovering latent elements of magic within the mundane. Full of lyrical sentences, stylized prose, and moments that are by turns funny and poignant, and often both at once, SOUND LIKE TRAPPED THUNDER troubles the distinction between the human and the animal, calling into question such tidy categories we rely upon to help make sense of ourselves and the world we live in.