An American Map

Oomen, who loves 'home and isolation' in Empire, Lake Michigan, makes surprising pilgrimages to the four corners of the nation. Her gifts are evocation of place, bringing a new-born freshness to landscape, flora, and weather, and her empathy for people linked to the land-an old Indian close to her home, a Puerto Rican flower grower on a pilgrimage to the rain forest peak of El Yunque-are beautifully drawn."

~Peter Skinner

One of Oomen's many talents as a writer is for lovely, complicated sentences that offer a careful understanding of the actions taking places and an acknowledgement of the deeper undercurrent that stirs below the surface. Part traveler's guide, part soul-searching memoir, part political commentary, An American Map is a richly painted canvas of the small but resonating experiences of a woman in love with, and inquisitive of, her home country."

~ForeWord Magazine

In these essays of place, Anne-Marie Oomen-poet, playwright, performer, teacher, memoirist-turns experience in her prose like a precious jewel, polishing every facet. With penetrating insight, generous warmth, and keen attention to the lilt and heft of language, she transforms each locale she occupies into a place that inhabits the reader."

~Robert Root

Anne-Marie Oomen's full-hearted essays in An American Map remind us that to be rooted in place is also to be rooted in tenderness and compassion toward humanity. Her beautiful language and elegant images lead us to a clarified sense of our yearning to belong-to a people and to a place. It's very satisfying to go along as she moves through landscapes that feed her, from the mist-drenched mountains of Puerto Rico to the urban precincts of New York and back to her own home in northern Michigan, and to go along with her as she fervently embraces her own family relationships and confronts her fears about human fate."

~Debra Gwartney

In this wonderfully moving book, Anne Marie Oomen, one of our finest regional essayists, goes looking for a larger map. She hits the road in the true American spirit, although this traveler is a midwestern woman, comfortable with her age and uncertainties. She turns the passion and precision of her prose on places as different as the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Santa Monica pier, as the coral reefs off Puerto Rico and the alvar plains on Drummond Island. As she must, she returns to northwestern Michigan, the home ground of her imagination, with a generous vision that allows all of us to share in the fragile but precious knowledge she has acquired on her journey."

~Keith Taylor