• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2023 January #1
  Beginning with a haunting photograph of a dead wolf lying alongside a road, essayist Berry uses her obsession with another wolf, OR-7, the seventh wolf radio-collared in Oregon, to follow the story of wolves in that state and confront her own fears. What is it about wolves that they are both creatures to fear and environmental poster animals? As Berry learns about wolves and OR-7's family, she finds that her wolf obsession has affected how she reckoned with things that scare her. Her account of her journey to confront and assimilate her fears and of the wolves that arrived on their own to repopulate Oregon is hypnotic. We feel her unease at the attentions of a strange man on a cross-country train, but we also feel awe for the pioneering wolves, joy at their producing cubs, and anger and sadness at the shooting of wolves. Interlaced with myriad quotations from other essayists, scientific papers, fairy tales, and feminist writings, this blend of memoir and nature writing will call to those who delve deeply into themselves and into our relationship with the wild. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Erica Berry is a writer based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her essays can be found in print and online with The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Atlantic, Guernica, and others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and the Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she is the recipient of fellowships and funding from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. Her work has been supported through residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Monson Arts, the Marble House Project, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. The 2019-2020 Writer-in-Residence and Teaching Fellow with the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan, she is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools with Literary Arts in Portland, and has taught writing classes with the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys, Craigardan Residency and Education Center, and the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School in Sicily. Wolfish is her first book.