Traveling With the Primates
by Kathryn Rantala

Description

Selected short prose and poetry in an assortment of styles from the expansive to the stringently minimal, from the lyrical through the scientific to the experimental, selected to celebrate the travels, adventures and interests of the author and Rantala’s now deceased husband of thirty years, anthropologist Daris Swindler. Illustrated with black and white photographs of primates–mostly taken by Bryan McCarvey, mostly monkeys; 76 pages. Limited Edition; previously circulated privately now on general sale.

“Rantala’s elegiac, erudite, and highly particularized miscellany is a tribute to her passionate requirement that what passes for most unseen be paid close attention and memorialized in language.” (Norman Lock)

Excerpt:

He had been staring into his coffee when she noticed he was also smiling.

“What?” she asked. He was happiest when he had a plan.

“It would be a good book or a monograph,” he said. “Flat Feet. It would draw connections between Watson’s book, Darwin: The Indelible Stamp, and people’s understanding of human anatomy; how to interpret the ‘scars of human evolution,’ you know, the very non-useful things we have inherited like weak backs, tailbones and flat feet.”

It was Saturday morning and a fine, dense Seattle mist clung to the windows. While he continued to think she listened to Brahm’s Third Symphony on the radio. As the second movement was giving way to the third, the mist began to accumulate into drops and merge together with other drops and as they grew heavier and bigger and more complex they sagged and ran down the glass in wavy wet lines making a kind of curtain.