Mark Books

Each of Amy Leach's bite-sized lyrical essays is a plunge into a rabbit hole of her own devise, yet one that feels far less like a construct than the everyday flow of Leach's mind, which must be a wonderful place to inhabit.

For instance, in “Goats and Bygone Goats,” she posits what a world of sound we’d experience if sound waves did not decay but persisted infinitely in their travels, delivering to our ears the sounds of worlds long past - "extinct toxodons, and prehistoric horses wearing pottery bells, and dead bats chewing crackly flies" - before launching wholly sideways down an inquiry into the nature of goats - Hungarian improved goats, Spanish mountain goats, and fainting goats, all of whom, Leach tells us, learn by chewing - "They investigate by chewing and chew more than they swallow, in contrast to sharks who investigate by swallowing and swallow more than they chew."