In Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery, fractures are left exposed, adhered with sap, and adorned with gold dust.
“The mending of the vessel becomes part of the value and the history,” said Katherine Larson, poet, ecologist, Tucson dweller, and author of the upcoming lyric essay collection “Wedding of the Foxes: Essays.”
The book will be Larson’s first nonfiction collection. 2011’s “Radial Symmetry” won the Yale Younger Poets Prizev — a distinction shared by the likes of Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery — and 2016’s “The Speechless Ones” won the Vercelli International Civic Poetry Prize.
Larson determined to write the collection after speaking with students and ecologists, who were largely “overwhelmed, helpless and apathetic” about the state of the natural world, according to Larson. Influenced by Kintsugi, the writer combined elements of poetry, ecology, philosophy, folklore and more to convey themes of repair, resilience and possibility.
“All of the essays in some way or another circle those themes,” Larson said.
“We have to live with the moment that we’re at. We’re living through the sixth mass extinction, but at the same time, how can we move forward in a helpful and hopeful and more resilient way?”
The sixth extinction, brought to public attention by Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” is the idea that the Earth is encountering a mass extinction event brought about by human activity, namely, unsustainable agricultural practices.
“It’s a short period of geological time in which a high percentage of biodiversity is lost,” Larson said. “The way that human beings are using this planet is causing this extinction.”
Ecology and writing have always been Larson’s “two great loves.” Her father was a professor of forestry, her mother a “science lover,” and she recalls spending much of her youth outdoors. Later, Larson would graduate from UA with her first degree: a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
The following years saw Larson employed in ecological genetics and molecular biology labs, and working for nonprofits like CEDO Intercultural, which is dedicated to biodiversity conservation and education in the North and Upper Gulf of California. Today, when she is not writing, she spends much of her time gardening with native plants and rock hounding with her two children.
“I think the reason why I love ecology so much is because it’s about invisible things,” Larson said. “Things that you can’t always see, the relationships between both humans and their nonliving and living environment.”
These invisible connections are a through line in the collection. Her essay “Kintsugi: Art of Repair,” begins with two stories weaved together: the 15th century invention of Kintsugi and Larson’s own exchange with a teenage student. The student questions the importance of protecting endangered and threatened species. “‘If we were unaware of them completely,’” the teenager supposes, “‘would it matter, really, if we lost them?’”
This scene of the teenager — puzzled, peering at a whale skeleton — presents the reader with a severed connection, a fracture akin to the shōgun’s broken, prized teabowl. This is the struggle of the sixth extinction, according to Larson, of losing those “invisible things,” that attracted the writer to ecology in the first place.
“So much of what’s going on is beyond what we actually see and experience,” Larson said. “We’re losing species. But at the same time that we’re losing species, we’re also losing all of the interconnected relationships that those species have.”
“But in our day to day lives, we don’t necessarily see them.”
In “Haunted Household Objects,” a favorite of Larson’s, the writer imagines a scenario which confronts us with the loss of those relationships. Inspired by a museum exhibit in White Sands, New Mexico, Larson pulls from Shinto folklore the concept of Tsukumogami, objects that are inhabited by spirits after 100 years of use.
“What would it mean if we actually had to live with the ghosts of those that are gone around us? How would we see things differently?”
Through braided, collage and epistolary essays, Larson’s story of repair is told in bits, fragments that become a whole. Among the shards that she adheres together are a letter to Godzilla, an essay on crane extinction, one on the art of reframing failure, stories of her own life and her children, chunks of ecofeminist philosophy and letters to six “inspiring and brilliant” Japanese women writers, accompanied by teapots that the Larson collected from thrift stores over several years.
“There’s a lot,” Larson said. “Whether it’s figuring out one’s own form of resistance, or figuring out how regenerative solitude can be, or how to rehabilitate wonder in an age where it’s hard to do.”
Summer Social: Book launch for Katherine Larson’s Wedding of the Foxes
WHERE: The Century Room at Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress St.
WHEN: 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 3
COST: Free, cash bar.
INFO: poetry.arizona.edu
This article appears in Jul 17-24, 2025.