YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree,
Yucca brevifolia
Barret Baumgart's YUCK: The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia is winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction.
Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer? Get ready to hate your life. It's not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake, the Joshua Tree.
"One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant... A landscape filled with Joshua Trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal." —Joseph Smeaton Chase, 1919
Similarly, few terms exist that do not fit Barret Baumgart's appalling YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtaposition, and a buried true history that will have you asking yourself the big questions, particularly... Why am I here?
Who knows, but here you are... in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a brief and searing ode to the world's hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.
YUCK presents an unsettling new history of one of the most loathed and beloved objects on the planet, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. It primarily focuses on the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree beginning in the late 1870s in Southern California. The Joshua Tree was universally reviled as the most grotesque object on earth following its discovery by white Europeans in the 1840s. Numerous schemes arose to extirpate it from the planet, the most promising among them an attempt to turn the tree into paper, "California Cactus Paper" [YUCK is, of course, printed on faux CA Cactus Paper]. The book excavates this unknown, buried history against the ironic backdrop of the Joshua Tree today becoming the ultra-hip signifier of some kind of cultural authenticity, and its national park the most photographed and fastest growing in the nation #JoshuaTree. This current popularity boom, in a further irony, is occurring just as scientists warn that the tree will likely vanish due to climate change by the end of the century.
YUCK is a prismatic collage, a poetic wandering, a compact history of the West as twisted and weird and ominous and beautiful as the plant it obsesses over. From divine providence to gaseous landfill to Instagram paradise, Yuck deftly traces the modern history of a small patch of desert to leave us with a big warning about America's demented relationship with the land. Baumgart's brief book will turn your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation and so should be required reading at the gates of the national park.
--Joshua Wheeler, author of Acid West and The High Heaven
Barret Baumgart’s appropriately tangled and marvelous ode to the Joshua tree—part poetry, part cultural history, part confrontation with a Mojave mystery—deftly honors one of the Southwest’s most compelling and symbolically rich inhabitants. It also confirms Baumgart’s status as one of the leading chroniclers of the California weird.
--Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State and High Weirdness
Barret Baumgart’s YUCK is part tract or pamphlet, part prose poem, an uncomfortable yet entertaining meditation on California and nature in the tradition of both Robinson Jeffers and Mike Davis. Anyone who has visited the Joshua Trees in the Mojave Desert, anyone who lives in the Golden State or in the West, will want to read this natural history of yucca trees--with their grotesque arms like monsters in pain . . . stranded in tortured frenzy—that is also a brief unnatural history of what we have done to the place where they grow.
--A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018
Baumgart’s ecstatic prose turns the Joshua Tree into a mind-expanding mirror. Through the prism of modern man’s encounter with this singular, surreal tree, Barret Baumgart’s YUCK illuminates the history of southern California and the carnival of human wastefulness and desire for transcendence that has fueled the evolution of the region from arid desert to epicenter of global consumption. YUCK is an unforgettable read that pulls you along with its propulsive, poetic language, and leaves you with a wide sobering view of the land and our all-too-human relation to it.
--Jesús Castillo, author of Two Murals and Remains
Against the grain of the buzz-saw and business of famous Joshua Tree—once a sparsely populated stopping place in the Mojave Desert—Barret Baumgart’s fascinating YUCK offers the human-like trees, arms raised, as a metaphor for the overconsumption of the American West. Like desert winds combing through creosote and Yucca brevifolia, YUCK’s ingenious approach to the stinky yet iconic desert tree shapes the archival into the lyrical, inviting readers into a captivating and urgent contemplation of the ecology, capitalism, and history of Los Angeles. In YUCK, with “the whispered cough of a word, uncouth in sound—yucca, yucca,” Baumgart offers a story of climate disaster and climate tourism, inviting us to encounter the Joshua tree as an elegiac symbol and warning.
--Tyler Mills, author of The Bomb Cloud and Hawk Parable
Are you headed to Joshua Tree this summer? Get ready to hate your life. It's not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample the park, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake, the Joshua Tree.
"One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant... A landscape filled with Joshua Trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal." —Joseph Smeaton Chase, 1919
Similarly, few terms exist that do not fit Barret Baumgart's appalling YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtaposition, and a buried true history that will have you asking yourself the big questions, particularly... Why am I here?
Who knows, but here you are... in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a brief and searing ode to the world's hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.
YUCK presents an unsettling new history of one of the most loathed and beloved objects on the planet, the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia. It primarily focuses on the discovery, naming, and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree beginning in the late 1870s in Southern California. The Joshua Tree was universally reviled as the most grotesque object on earth following its discovery by white Europeans in the 1840s. Numerous schemes arose to extirpate it from the planet, the most promising among them an attempt to turn the tree into paper, "California Cactus Paper" [YUCK is, of course, printed on faux CA Cactus Paper]. The book excavates this unknown, buried history against the ironic backdrop of the Joshua Tree today becoming the ultra-hip signifier of some kind of cultural authenticity, and its national park the most photographed and fastest growing in the nation #JoshuaTree. This current popularity boom, in a further irony, is occurring just as scientists warn that the tree will likely vanish due to climate change by the end of the century.
YUCK is a prismatic collage, a poetic wandering, a compact history of the West as twisted and weird and ominous and beautiful as the plant it obsesses over. From divine providence to gaseous landfill to Instagram paradise, Yuck deftly traces the modern history of a small patch of desert to leave us with a big warning about America's demented relationship with the land. Baumgart's brief book will turn your Joshua Tree vacation into a terrifying revelation and so should be required reading at the gates of the national park.
--Joshua Wheeler, author of Acid West and The High Heaven
Barret Baumgart’s appropriately tangled and marvelous ode to the Joshua tree—part poetry, part cultural history, part confrontation with a Mojave mystery—deftly honors one of the Southwest’s most compelling and symbolically rich inhabitants. It also confirms Baumgart’s status as one of the leading chroniclers of the California weird.
--Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State and High Weirdness
Barret Baumgart’s YUCK is part tract or pamphlet, part prose poem, an uncomfortable yet entertaining meditation on California and nature in the tradition of both Robinson Jeffers and Mike Davis. Anyone who has visited the Joshua Trees in the Mojave Desert, anyone who lives in the Golden State or in the West, will want to read this natural history of yucca trees--with their grotesque arms like monsters in pain . . . stranded in tortured frenzy—that is also a brief unnatural history of what we have done to the place where they grow.
--A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018
Baumgart’s ecstatic prose turns the Joshua Tree into a mind-expanding mirror. Through the prism of modern man’s encounter with this singular, surreal tree, Barret Baumgart’s YUCK illuminates the history of southern California and the carnival of human wastefulness and desire for transcendence that has fueled the evolution of the region from arid desert to epicenter of global consumption. YUCK is an unforgettable read that pulls you along with its propulsive, poetic language, and leaves you with a wide sobering view of the land and our all-too-human relation to it.
--Jesús Castillo, author of Two Murals and Remains
Against the grain of the buzz-saw and business of famous Joshua Tree—once a sparsely populated stopping place in the Mojave Desert—Barret Baumgart’s fascinating YUCK offers the human-like trees, arms raised, as a metaphor for the overconsumption of the American West. Like desert winds combing through creosote and Yucca brevifolia, YUCK’s ingenious approach to the stinky yet iconic desert tree shapes the archival into the lyrical, inviting readers into a captivating and urgent contemplation of the ecology, capitalism, and history of Los Angeles. In YUCK, with “the whispered cough of a word, uncouth in sound—yucca, yucca,” Baumgart offers a story of climate disaster and climate tourism, inviting us to encounter the Joshua tree as an elegiac symbol and warning.
--Tyler Mills, author of The Bomb Cloud and Hawk Parable
Barret Baumgart is the author of China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe, which won the 2016 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, and was named among the best nonfiction of 2017 by Kirkus and Brooklyn Rail. Barret's essays and stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review online, The Seneca Review, Vice, and The Literary Review, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
barretbaumgart.com
barretbaumgart.com