"Blue Hours is a marvelous book. Marvellous : causing wonder and awe. Here are paradoxes that reveal wisdom deeper than rational thought can reach: In the most desperate darkness, there is starlight. In the most brilliant day, there are terrifying shadows. In perhaps the most sterile place on the planet, there is an unbearable urgency for life--in polar explorers, improbable penguins, huskies frozen in mid-howl and, especially, in the author's own heart, also howling like hurricane-force winds. I thought this was a truly wonderful book--lavishly researched, jaggedly honest, compelling, and beautiful." --Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort "Welcome to a wholly new Antarctica! Corporeal and ripe, in Stephanie Krzywonos' immersive debut Antarctica is no longer a stage on which human dramas play out but a kinetic force bringing true transformation to those who dare to call her home." --Elizabeth Rush, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of Rising and The Quickening " The Blue Hours brings us Antarctica: life-giving, life-ending, alive and agential.
As personally searching as it is brimming with knowledge, this astonishing book shows us what journeying to the end of the Earth can be, beyond masculine tropes and tales of adventure. Overflowing with creatures, colorful auroras, and a search for solace in the deepest cold, it will reward reading and re-reading." --Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals , Two Trees Make a Forest , and Turning "In this breathtaking memoir, Stephanie Krzywonos brings us to Antarctica, where she, like many before her, has come to face the night and its shadows. What may first appear as a bleak and menacing landscape becomes, to the author, like a friend: teeming with grace and with life. With thrilling prose, Krzywonos teaches us Antarctica's topography, its history, its role in the human imaginary, its uncertain future in the age of climate emergency, and how her time there taught her how to live. The Blue Hours is a stunning testament to the power of a landscape upon the human spirit." --Lauren Markham, author of A Map of Future Ruins and Immemorial.