Literary Nonfiction. FLUTTER POINT's essays are palpably haunted by the past and future of our species and planet. But Anderson does something rare and even hopeful, even so: his ruminations pry apart our default intuitions about humanness and animality, the natural and built environments, art, language, and the body, and hold them apart like parentheses for us, to find a little space inside. In that space, these essays search for truthful, appropriate kinds of mourning and pleasure, presence and detachment. The brilliance of FLUTTER POINT is that what results are fresh new forms of the essay--moving, intelligent, relentless, still, and made exactly for our time.--Kristin Dombek

Erik Anderson, in these very edgy essays of FLUTTER POINT, mines the rich ore of the 'or, ' back slashing, back and forth, through the porous membranes of punctuated category, the skeletal strata of this gelatinous and layered world. To 'decide' is to cut, to sever, and Anderson is a katana smith par excellence, folding fluid steel, folding it back on itself again and again, peening home the sudden stunning serration less, it seems, than a molecule thick, while still separating out those old infinite spaces between the stars and the anxious quantum angstroms buzzing at the center of our very beings.--Michael Martone