Winner of the 2023 Gournay Prize
“When the World Explodes is a collection both explosive and tender, epic in its scope yet granular in its concerns. Writing with the precision and wonder of a poet, Amy Lee Scott reaches back in time, excavating science and history alongside her own lost story of origin, to reveal an understanding of the present that feels fierce, loving, and new.” —Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie
“Spare and unsparing, When the World Explodes quakes with anxiety, simmers with rage, and breaks open with loss after loss. Amy Lee Scott manages to take refuge in research, collecting the fragments of cataclysm and reverberation, while surveying a shifting landscape of tragedy, transformation, and escape. This book knows how to keep its distance, to keep at arm’s length forces that bring us to our knees—yet it takes us again and again to the brink.” —A. Kendra Green, author of No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity
“More of a dare to live than a meditation on life, When the World Explodes gathers up stories as if it would starve without them. Unblinking and entreating the reader not to blink, it posits that the risk of loss pales in comparison to the risk of a life where nothing was risked. In this book, Scott accomplishes what all great essayists aspire to: brutal beauty and tender terror.” —Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, author of Don’t Come Back
“When the World Explodes speaks to the vast, haunting layers of transracial adoptee grief. These essays sing forth with lyrical and sensory depth, braided with questions of belonging and selfhood, and tie personal grief—the loss of both of Scott’s mothers—to the trembling world around us. This collection will open your heart.” —Jane Wong, author of How Not to Be Afraid of Everything
“Amy Lee Scott bravely mines the depths of her own grief and emerges with moments of heartbreaking clarity. Blending these personal reflections with explorations of larger-scale cultural traumas, her essays are deeply introspective but never navel-gazing, full of fear and hope and love. A jewel box of grief.” —Tyler Feder, author of Dancing at the Pity Party
“Amy Lee Scott’s essays arise from a felt sense of how closely, how precariously, how beautifully our lives intertwine. This is a book full of restless grace and tender curiosity. Read it and you'll find yourself less alone in what’s left of our exploding world.” —Eric LeMay, author of Remember Me: An Essay
“This richly written book is both vulnerable and unflinching; it does not flinch from conflagrations, it does not flinch from joy. Honoring the enormity of disasters as well as the delicacy of flying spiders—and babies—who start life up again after a disaster, Scott’s book thawed my heart, and I felt the miracle of our delicate flying lives.” —Amy Leach, author of The Everybody Ensemble
How do you survive when your world explodes? By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid “born” at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mother’s illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamities—from Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhood—to unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.
Amy Lee Scott received an MFA from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing can be found in Tin House Online, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, Fourth Genre, Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Find her at amyleescott.com.
Contents
When the World Explodes
Conflagrations, and the Quelling Of
Convergence
BabyLand
Of Floods and Ruination
Field Guide to a Common Pregnancy: Notes on Loss and Growth
Theories of Cosmogony
Everyone Knows One
How Do You Name a Hurricane?
How to Survive an Active Attacker
Airborne Toxic Events
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
