The Hopes of Snakes

Couturier’s essays shine with her candor, her perception, and her affection for the creatures of our world. Whether the subject is a snake or a falcon or a crow named Edgar, these essays will both enlighten and give much reading pleasure.–Mary Oliver

“Couturier enters the terrain staked out by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge. In these moving essays, Couturier does not so much domesticate the wilderness as reveal the wildness within the domestic.”–Publishers Weekly

“The essays combine nature writing, philosophy, theology and feminism . . . the writing is lyrical, even when Couturier explores the ecology of New York’s subways.”–USA Today

“Beautiful, intelligent, and literary . . . this book is a wondrous pleasure, yet it has the ability to shift the way you look at the natural world. The Hopes of Snakes belongs on the bookshelf next to Edward Abbey’s The Serpents of Paradise and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and, like those, is a book to savor, to know, to love and to share.”–The Oregonian