Author Description

"In Earthquakes and Gardens, professor of religion Virginia Burrus pursues an earthquake from the deep past and tracks the fallen monuments and resurgent gardens of a distant city. The starting point is Hilarion, a Christian saint who saw the recorded intensity of a mighty quake in the toppled buildings of fourth-century Cyprus. In The Life of Saint Hilarion, written in 390, we see those buildings through Saint Hilarion's eyes in just a few lines. Building out from this fragment of text and the mental images that come with it, Burrus delivers a remarkable set of meditations on the human experience of place. Earthquakes and Gardens is a methodological experiment in close and promiscuous reading, an exercise in place-centered rumination, and a powerful set of observations on destruction and resilience. The scale ranges from the deeply personal to the massive and collective. In Burrus's capable hands, earthquakes and gardens anchor us in our textual fragments while also drawing us elsewhere, opening onto more-than-human worlds that are both concrete and metaphorical, close and distant"--