Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki is an expansive book. It is a standard work of journalism, describing with nuance and humanity the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor. It is also a meditation on what it means to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America. And it is a ghost story about marriage. It is an inquiry into the limits of language and certainty, a rumination on North American colonization, masculinity, gift cards, crab rangoon, bald eagles, and wood, all of it told in an exciting, energized, and original prose.
