The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods & Other Small Spirits

The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods & Other Small Spirits reels from poetry to prose to mythical field guide in a matter of pages, leaping between genres and embracing the surreal. Kimberly Ramos finds minor gods across disciplines: meet the swirling black abyss that lives in internet question forums, or better yet, spend a moment with the humble hero of biology, the fruit fly. Fusing imagery from astrophysics and anatomy with symbols from folklore and pop culture, this "Frankenstein's monster" of a book is a delightful stitching of unusually harmonious odds and ends.

Readers will enjoy journeying through this bestiary of oddness. Traverse lunar maria, tip toe past dolphin-man hybrids, and spelunk through the long-abandoned lead mines of Southern Missouri. From the "hazy shapes and staggered light" of minnows to the "jagged maw" of one's familial past, Ramos searches for the small theophanies present in the everyday. Even more, this journey is just as humorous as it is earnest: watch Socrates get blackout drunk at a house party, admire the secret love lives of face mites, and pity God, who cannot afford a phone plan but instead communicates using a simple tin can and string.

Part spellbook, part Midwestern mythos, The Beginner's Guide to Minor Gods & Other Small Spirits is an ode to the interconnectedness of the sciences, the arts, and history. Have a seat and take part in this "dream blunt rotation" of cloud-obsessed scientists, monstrous philosophers, and strangers on the internet.