From Outside, America. Published by Nightwood Editions in 2019. Sarah de Leeuw is a writer and researcher. Her work has won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize, been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and been a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize. Her essays have won two CBC literary awards and a Western Magazine Gold Award.
Scientists don’t necessarily name the places but speak instead of mid-to-large centres, are focused on impact instead of precise dimensions although I always think of Chicago, where we met, evolving into us like cities shaping wingspans of small songbirds, shorter, blunter limbs for agile flight through skyscrapers and traffic, the way you and I balance on a fire escape, gingerly side stepping my confession of upcoming marriage, watching raccoons and spiders, each on average three times larger than their rural counterparts, our families thinking we’re here for business, or coyotes and foxes adapted to anonymous garbage foraging under streetlights, nights far from forests, dens with pups and fish scents, pavement an econiche, camouflage to evolutionary biologists observing that while the size of human thumbs has increased within a decade of texting, empathy has decreased with the use of cellphones that alter migration routes of bees and monarch butterflies as we Skype to arrange another metropolitan meeting.