One With the Tiger

Praise For This Book

"Reading One with the Tiger is like watching Mike Tyson bite off Evander Holyfield's ear or like looking at pictures of the victims of chimpanzee attacks: horrifying and startlingly true." --The Paris Review

"[An] insightful exploration of human infatuation with nonhuman animals." --Publishers Weekly

"Church does well in connecting the human fascination with apex predator behavior and its potential relation to our own animal instincts...[a] captivating study." --Library Journal

"One With the Tiger explores the deep human need to participate in an atavistic ecstasy; to be, as Church puts it "absorbed but not destroyed." Church's approach is not clinical, moralizing, or gee-whiz superficial; it is, to our benefit, essayistic. By circling rather than simplifying, he illuminates the taboo, ever-shifting boundaries between man and animal. Church is the rare author who knows what's interesting-- which is to say, uncomfortable--about his chosen subject." --Kerry Howley, author of Thrown

"One with the Tiger is a meditation on animality and the space between suburbs and savanna, citizenship and savagery. Church is as close to the teeth of the beast as he is to escape. This is his love letter to animal magnetism, primal fear, and the wilderness of human imagination. The genius of this book is how it questions who is in captivity: the tiger in its cage or you." - Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

"From the iron of a zoo cage's bars to the expanse of our nation's national parks, One With the Tiger examines the spaces in which humans contain animals, and how those acts of containment often fail. Church is a classically essayistic observer--curious, haunted, self-deprecating--and it's through this lens that we're confronted with stories of infamous animal attacks, pop culture icons, and the author's own longing to inch forward as a bear approaches. In this marvelous collection, Church seems to write his consciousness directly onto the page, and in it we can see an entire civilization's clumsy, sometimes desperate, attempts to understand our relationship to the wild." --Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This

"Church has written a funny, smart, and terrifying book that explores the invisible boundaries between human and animal. This sensitive and thoughtful writer allows the reader to hear the siren call of the wild and step deep into the existential anxiety of what it means to be human." --Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp

"One With the Tiger, Steven Church stalks the entire genre of nature writing, rips it down to the raw bone, then reassembles the parts into something totally new and utterly compelling. Like the best of John Krakauer or Rebecca Solnit, the narrative pulls you in and absolutely refuses to let you go--or forget. Church is writing at the very apex of his game, and One with the Tiger is likely the most innovative, disturbing, and brilliant book you'll read all year." --Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

"Some of us are born with a lust for the ledges, for any chance to make the leap. In this mesmerizing collection, Steven Church proves, once again, that he is a master of evaporating lines between fact and fiction, imagination and memory. 'It's strange how a subject overtakes you, ' Church tells us. This book overtook me." --Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren't and editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

"Muscular, vulnerable, twitchy, and relentlessly curious, Steven Church's awesome One With the Tiger stalks some of our most absurd, sometimes-violent, and uncontainable compulsions for communion and self-destruction, and finds, lurking within them, such a fragile, funny, and heartbreaking humanity that it's all we can do as readers to leap and leap into the exhilarating zoo pit of this book, and to emerge as better, more baffling, and more beautiful mutants. Church's interrogation of our cockeyed innateness braids evisceration with assurance, bite with whisper. This book tears us open by way of acceptance, the drive to assuage, the electric and desperate urge to unearth the secrets fueling the shadowy back-alleys of our hearts. I never wanted Church's wild and bemused treatises on absorption, collision, truth, family, ecstasy, strange spiritual yearning and--ultimately--even stranger empathy to ever stop." --Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost

"Church's essays do what only the best essays can -- they hold countless tensions in a single paragraph. One with the Tiger is as funny as it is rigorous, as curious as it is vulnerable, an ecstatic combination of hope and doom." --Lucas Mann, author of Lord Fear

"The further Church leads us through the explorations in One with the Tiger, the richer they become. His own excitement is contagious and you soon find yourself as obsessed as the author himself. Truly intoxicating." --Taylor Goldsmith, lead singer/songwriter of Dawes

Praise for Ultrasonic

"If you liked Leslie Jamison's Empathy Exams or Charles D'Ambrosio's Loitering, try Steven Church's latest collection, Ultrasonic, a group of essays brought together by the theme of sound. Church at times seems to say, I make noise, therefore I am. He dissects the nature of sound waves in a racquetball court, counts the seconds between lightning and thunder, and listens for signs of life from trapped miners--and his digressions invariably come back around to sucker punch you. Church uses sound to explore notions of masculinity and fatherhood, love and death." --The Paris Review

"Steven Church seems to get better with every book he writes, but it's hard to fathom how he is going to top this one. Ultrasonic, in which his intellect is overshadowed only by his humanity, is the best so far." --The Los Angeles Review of Books

"What makes Church's Ultrasonic so invigorating is the incendiary alchemy at work on these pages, a churning, visceral process that demands attention and response. This is what the best writing accomplishes. Beyond just making the personal relatable, or universal--noble achievements in themselves--the best writing sparks a conflagration of memories, welds itself to our psyche and becomes a part of our emotional-intellectual-creative forge. And this in turn is the amalgamation of culture itself, how we ingest, interpret, appropriate and re-mix the art of others into our own offering, our own limb of the cultural sculpture." --Brevity

"Church's Ultrasonic essays don't just stop time, they romp through it." --Essay Daily

"All of the essays in Ultrasonic that require historical inquiry feel thoroughly and affectionately researched, and all the moments that don't require formal research--those which draw on significant moments in Church's own life--manage to strike an effective balance between tenderness and bitterness. The moves Church makes "sound right" because they feel (and are) part of a larger network--a series of stories, memories, ideas, and language games whose careful connections sneak up on you." American Book Review

"The essay at its best has a modal quality to it, moving from description to exposition to meditation, and that modal quality is on display throughout Church's essays--at one point he even ventures into the fictive, going so far as to imagine a racquetball game said to have been played by Elvis Presley the night he died. This ability to move from one mode of writing to another allows Church to create a kind of topography of surface, one whose contours gesture toward the depths beneath it." - The Collapsar.com

"Grand and active listening requires real engagement and unexpected risks. In Steven Church's thoroughly alive compendium, the act of listening itself has the power to create identity, lead inward towards irrevocable grief and awe, and outward into the ever-curious world. How "ultra" in its sonic musings can a mind be? Church's intense soundscape considers subjects as ranging as racquetball, idleness, and firefighting, as poetic as word-origins, and as ancient as birth, love, and loss."
--Lia Purpura, author of Rough Likeness and On Looking

"Each beautifully crafted essay in Steven Church's Ultrasonic invites the reader into an intriguing new world. From Elvis playing racquetball to the drumming heartbeat of an infant to prehistoric bottom feeders, Church's endless curiosity and wildly intelligent prose pierce the literary bull's-eye, spot on.
--Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

"Steven Church has spent the past decade quietly becoming one of our best essayists, and I've been eagerly awaiting the book containing these deeply resonant essays. By turns humorous, reflective, curious, mischievous, and profound, Ultrasonic gives booming confirmation: Church's is a voice we should all listen to." --Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana

"If Montaigne were a mad cartographer driven to find the true unnamable intersection of earth and human body, with a heart the size of the sun, he would have looked something like Steven Church. The collection begins as a meditation on the ways in which we use sound to draw chalk outlines around the things we can see only incompletely, and then becomes so much more than that--one of the oddest and loveliest meditations on parenthood I've ever read. I love this book beyond reason, and I love it beyond whatever reason's opposite is too."
--Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer

"Steven Church writes with the virtuosic intelligence and digressive curiosity of Montaigne, but beneath the desk his feet are planted firmly on a double bass kick drum. These essays rumble and crack with percussive thunder; they thrum with music and rhythm; like the best heavy metal or rap, they kickstart the heart muscle. With equal parts tenderness and rage, Church tunnels through our noise-laden culture to locate a clear signal: it's empathy--for our children, our neighbors, our fellow humans. I can't think of another collection that has moved me so deeply on both sensory and emotional levels. Ultrasonic is a tale told by a literary mastermind, full of sound and fury, signifying everything."
--Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates to the Wonderworld

"Like Elvis Presley's legendarily fierce final match on the Graceland racquetball court, these essays ricochet, they zing, they demand our attention. Steven Church's spinning insights often come with lightning quickness--surprise attacks buried in graceful delivery--but his approach is so welcoming I found myself rising back to my feet for return service at every paragraph. Readers who fancy a bout of lively and uncompromising nonfiction will find a worthy opponent in these nimble inquiries about sound, tricks of memory, limitations of the body, and the varied perils of American manhood.
--Elena Passarello, author of Let Me Clear My Throat "[One With The Tiger] is exactly what literary nonfiction should be: imaginative, formally elastic, emotionally engrossing, and deeply intelligent." --LitHub