Splendored Thing: Love, Roses & Other Thorny Treasures
ISBN: 1-58005-074-3
U.S. $19.95
Canada $32.95
Hardcover
233 pages
Wherever books are sold
Distributed by Publishers Group West

In the mood to have the mental kaleidoscope moved around? Eager, in these gray days, for a different view? ...Bia is a lush writer: literary, quirky, mad in love with language. She writes personal essays that click in unusual, topical ways. Whether she's writing about venturing into Afghanistan after 9/11 or making a home in a 300-year-old Irish cottage, or the more arcane mysteries of eros and war, she galvanizes. Sharp, precise writer....
— P.J. Corkery, San Francisco Examiner, January 15, 2003

What do Helen Keller, James Baldwin, Rod Serling and Sara Lee have in common? Well, besides being deceased, they all appear in Bia Lowe's insightful new collection of essays, Splendored Thing: Love, Roses & Other Thorny Treasures. Anyone familiar with naturalist/writer Lowe's previous book, Wild Ride, knows she is adept at combining the colloquial, the scientific and the poetic. This time, her lyrical imagination takes on the subject of love — love between humans, love for a bear, love for a 300-year-old Irish cottage and for Afghanistan after Sept. 11. No sugar-coated Valentine, Splendored Thing is at times perilous and bitter, and cuts no corners in exposing love's demands.
— Jan Richman, special to SF Gate, January 16, 2003

Splendored Thing, flushed with emotional insight and engaging intelligence, is a most unusual memoir — more metaphorical rumination on the essence of love than traditional, linear life story…. Lowe's lush essays focus primarily on the fusion of the physical and the spiritual — memories triggered by the scent of roses, ardor excited by the brush of a hand, pleasure inspired by roast lamb pink on a plate. The combination — of suggestive personal story telling, fascinating natural history, and erudite yet accessible philosophical enquiry — is indeed splendid.
— Richard Labonte, Book Marks, February, 2003

The author of 1995's acclaimed Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills muses here on ordinary objects (mouths, roses, apples), familiar activities (falling, map reading, kissing) and traditional tales (Hansel and Gretel, the Three Bears, Rapunzel), offering commentaries that balloon like cotton candy, at first airy, then becoming dense. In these 15 genre-bending meditations, Lowe takes readers on a random-yet exhilarating-ride, toting along ideas from such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, James Baldwin, Helen Keller, Barbara McClintock and Roger Williams. Her voice is alternately impious, impish, sensuous, witty, probing and altogether passionate. The central theme is love, admittedly a "troublesome enterprise," but one that permeates many aspects of Lowe's life-she is in love with women, in love with words ("metaphor has more truth than details ever could"), and even in love with love itself. She examines love and conflict via a prism of examples, among them engaging in sexual behavior with a classmate when she was a young girl, pursuing cows gone loose in Ireland, sharing homemade lamb stew with new friends and responding to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Abstract as the essays can be, Lowe's love for "Rose, the pseudonymous woman, object of this valentine" and her measured compassion for her mother are fully concrete. She delightfully shares personal and historical anecdotes, all the while reflecting on the tremendous powers of love and fear.
— Publishers Weekly

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