cover image Querencia

Querencia

Stephen Bodio, Steve Bodio. Clark City Press, $12.95 (154pp) ISBN 978-0-944439-15-9

It is much easier to savor this delightful work than to pigeonhole it. Call it a memoir or a love story that eschews sentimentality or even a travel book: although set in the United States, the space the author ( A Rage for Falcons ) describes in exquisite detail is so personal that it could be another country altogether. The work recounts how Bodio, a self-taught naturalist from an ``almost-normal'' suburban family, met Betsy Huntington, a woman 20 years his senior who had exhausted her inherited fortune through travel though she still retained her ``drawled patrician vowels.'' These native Easterners made a life in the mountains of New Mexico during their seven years together, until Huntington's death. Residing with a menagerie of dogs, cats and birds in a stark landscape that is ``subtly or ferociously alien'' to most Americans, they came to relish rural life, hunting geese, deer and fossils, attending a cockfight, chasing coyotes, scrutinizing local rattlesnake and insect species and, of course, attending special events like the Annual Quemado Street Dance and Brawl. (Mar.)