In the Wilderness

Amazon BookPeople

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

PEN/Jerard Fund Award

Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award

“Moving…precise and honest…[Barnes] draws the extraordinary out of everyday life.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

“Barnes writes forgivingly about an unforgiving world, and her work shines with both innocence and wisdom.”

Glamour

I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river’s birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows.

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth but long on the riches of family, friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960’s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim’s father dug in and determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed. In the Wilderness is the poet’s own account of a journey toward adulthood against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as beautiful, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great forest itself. It is a story of how both faith and geography can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we all must enter to face our demons. Above all, it is the clear-eyed and moving account of a young woman’s coming of terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.

“In the Wilderness is far more than a personal memoir… it [demonstrates] the power of good prose to distinguish whatever it touches.”

Judges' statement, PEN/Jerard Fund Award

“We readers often approach poets’ memoirs warily: There is only so far that lovely, delicately crafted reminiscences of childhood can really take us. They deliver pleasure, easily, but rarely go beyond it to the kind of bold, perspective-wrenching joy that is the province of real literature. Barnes’s book forces reconsideration of the form…. This is a book about humility, and how one is of one’s origins, no matter how far a person has traveled in imagination, artistry, and insight.”

Library Journal

“Sad and beautiful…a book about humility, and how one is of one’s origins, no matter how far a person has traveled in imagination, artistry, and insight.”

Kirkus Reviews

“With its spirit and themes, [In the Wilderness] recalls the classic Norman Maclean autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It….”

Detroit Free Press

“Barnes’ elegiac memoir is an eloquent cry of loss for the Idaho forest in which, as a logger’s child, she spent the first twelve years of her life.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“Engrossing…revealing, spiritual, cleansing, transcendent–and awash in the elements that make life’s flow so unpredictable, wonderful, and often haunting.”

Chicago Tribune

“It is a testimony to Barnes’ skill as a writer that she visits both heaven and hell without exaggerating her experience. Her voice is trustworthy and riveting throughout the book. I stayed up most of the night to read on. I was never disappointed.”

Eugene Weekly

“Written from the heart…a mesmerizing read….her perspective is unapologetic and unself-pitying, making for a truly haunting tale.”

New Woman

“In this amazing book, Barnes defines the manacles that have bound Western women since the time of St. Paul with a love that constitutes a true ‘turning of the cheek.’ Then—without gross generalizations or ideological expounding, without playing the victim or seeking caustic revenge, relying on nothing but the beautifully expressed witness of a solitary and heroic girl’s life—she just as lovingly unlocks and steps free of those manacles. This story is an answer to a calling first heard in the wilderness. It’s a child’s promise to her parents and her God. It is a healing.”

David James Duncan

“Barnes’s vivid first book offers a wild, clean, poetic account of a singular journey through a childhood wilderness and adolescent badlands. Barnes writes with great beauty and temperance about spiritual and sensual battles, and the result is compelling in every way.”

Jim Grimsley

“In the Wilderness is a rarity. Barnes re-creates the ecstasy and terror of her adolescence in the big timber country of Idaho with taste and generosity. It is a world of hope and doubt, trust and betrayal, in which believers fast, demons appear, and children heal the sick… Barnes gives the reader everything and spares herself nothing. Her sure voice delivers the true drama of her family’s struggle with the sixties, the church, each other, and, ultimately, their own faith.”

Stewart O'Nan