The Wild Carrot Society
A seasonal book subscription
Magic realism. Renegade scholarship. Pastoral enchantment. The sublime.
Named after an early epiphany in Jean Giono's Joy of Man's Desiring, the Wild Carrot Society is a curated book subscription. Every three months, subscribers receive a care package of three titles that chart a course through the themes above.
The Wild Carrot Society is a balm against artificial encounter and an antidote to despair. Hand-picked and shipped with love, these books cast the algorithm back to the void from whence it came.
Constellation
Gretel Ehrlich
The glaciers are rivers, the sky is struck solid, the water is ink, the mountains are lights that go on and off. Sometimes I lie in my sleeping bag and recite a line from a Robert Lowell poem over and over: “Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise."
This Cold Heaven
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.
Wind, Sand and Stars
Annie Dillard
Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.
For the Time Being
Rumi, tr. by Haleh Liza Gafori
A lion leaps out of his cage.
A man leaps out of his mind.
Bravery is a delicious madness,
not some circumspect,
cagey thought,
sly and ungiving.
Gold
G. K. Chesterton
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—
The Man Who Was Thursday
Clarice Lispector
Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.
Agua Viva
Meet the Curator
Joe Deany-Braun is Perelandra’s steward. Known for his love of poetry and commitment to embodied experience, he brings an intellectually rigorous, open-hearted spirit to his work as a bookseller. You can learn more at deany-braun.com.