“In describing Love and Other Fish, I could use words like wonder, heartbreak, astonishment, clarity, rumination, and understanding. But what I really want to say is just read this book. With its beautiful narratives and contemplations, Love and Other Fish explores the strangeness of human experience and the strangeness of looking back. How wonderful and immersive to be guided by such a wise and generous writer.” ~Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir
“Hannah Hindley is one of those rare writers whose generosity, knowledge, and lyricism take you on adventures of the heart and wilds while also making you feel right at home. Love and Other Fish swims among watery lives, including ours, with assurance, vulnerability, and wisdom. These essays are gorgeous.” ~Christopher Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow
“These astonishing essays braid grief, science, and love so tenderly that the world itself feels newly textured—each fish, each memory, each bright moment asking us to pay better attention to what keeps us alive. Love and Other Fish moves with a deep tenderness—an attention to the overlooked and the nearly forgotten—and in doing so, builds a world where memory, love, and survival can swim and splash beside each other.” ~Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
“Science and the mysteries, the measurables, and the ineffables, the learned, and the felt are pulled together and arranged in this gorgeous collection, a musculature built of personal bravery and a sense of oneness with the natural world. A lyrical sensibility married to the precisions of scientific exploration—a profound combination of ways of being, thinking/feeling, and forging kinship with the wider world. I’m thrilled this book will be in the world, especially at a time when we need to be stunned back into love and care and other worlds.”
– Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers: Essays
“”Rete Mirabile” moves fluidly between taxonomy and personal vignette, stitching together a beautifully crafted piece that asks us who we are, who we’ve been, and how we are, ultimately, always plural animal selves. It’s a work that teaches and reaches for relation, asking readers–especially young women–to consider the pitfalls and possibilities of our gendered bodies.”
-Julietta Singh
Judge for the Carve Magazine 2021 Prose and Poetry Contest
“Anchored by Hannah Hindley’s liquid and radiant prose, the portfolio of Dick Evans attains something transcendent. His photography isn’t just about birds, it is about grace in evolution, its diversity, and its poetry.”
-Obi Kaufmann, author of The California Field Atlas series
Reader for In the Shadow of the Bridge, Heyday Press
“Lyrically flowing but syncopation breaks up the rhythm (along with the bones) so we feel each fracture and want to know more. Viscerally visual. There’s a back and forth here between the medicine, the science and first-person narrative that pulls and pushes pleasantly on head and heart . . . An absolute joy to read. A fragile story that reads and stands strong.”
-J. Drew Lanham
Judge’s comments for “Book of Bones,” winner of the 2022 Barry Lopez Prize in Nonfiction
Reader for Bay Nature, How to Be a Fox
“As for the work that does stand out, Hannah Hindley’s essay “Remembering That Life” begins slowly, with the story of the death of a pet fish. As she bluntly puts it: “I guess we’ve all seen dead fish.” But then, slowly, in a manner not unlike that of a tide, her purview widens to encompass visits to Harvard’s Ichthyology Collection, before expanding further to relate the story of a much greater loss. Throughout, her language, whether in descriptions of tiny fish “busily searching the underbelly of the surface for something I couldn’t provide…” or of an anglerfish’s lure: “I could almost see the flashes of bioluminescence scattering as it prowled through the lightless abyss… as careless, hungry little things wandered too close to that tempting filament and lost themselves in the fish’s cage of teeth…” points to something both more personal and more oceanic: “beneath our own thoughts, distant stars spun slowly in the wide currents of the night.” At its best, Hindley’s essay reaches a level which essays too infrequently attempt, let alone achieve: it becomes a meditation.”
-Laurence Levey
“Prestigious University Lit Mag Makes for a Serious Read,” 2015
Hannah Hindley 