It arrived at the height of the pandemic, in a brown envelope with no return address and too many stamps, none of which had been marked by the post office. It was addressed to me at my parents’ New York City apartment, where I haven’t lived in more than a decade. My mother used the envelope as a notepad for a few weeks, then handed it off to me in July; it was the first time I’d seen her after months of quarantine. Inside the envelope was a small, stapled book—a pamphlet, really—titled “Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi,” by a writer named Stokes Prickett. On the cover, there was a photograph of a burrito truck and a notice that read “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.” The book began with a Cide Hamete Benengeli-style introduction attributed to a Professor Sherbert Taylor. Then a fifty-five-page bildungsroman written in short sections with boldface titles. The prose reminded me a bit of Richard Brautigan.
“This is a nice little slice of what Minnesota should look like,” Sean Sherman says over his shoulder. We are passing through a fenced-in wetland—the wildest land left in Minneapolis—in its full midsummer languor. “This is all wild ginger,” he says, gesturing toward a colony of green, heart-shaped leaves covering the ground just off the well-manicured path. “It’s really strong,” he says, “so you don’t need to use a lot of it.”
I’m already starting to sweat in the humidity of what will become a scorching mid-July day, but I can still feel the cool damp clinging to the ferns unfurling beneath the oaks and tamaracks. It’s great to be back in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. The spring wave of Covid-19 delayed the garden’s opening by almost two months, and there are reminders that things are still extremely weird outside its gate: the path is newly marked as a one-way, and all the park benches are taped off like miniature crime scenes. Yet the vegetation is teeming more or less exactly the way it teemed a century ago, before many of the native plants in this area were tilled over into the undulating fairways of the big golf course next door—not too long after the state violently exiled the Native Dakota inhabitants to reservations out on the plains. The Wildflower Garden is named for the white schoolteacher and amateur botanist who preserved this refuge back in 1907, ensuring that a pocket of aboriginal plants remained to welcome back the occasional surviving Native—like the guy a couple steps ahead of me.
But what makes “Nightbitch” stand apart from the usual early motherhood stories, teeth and all, is that Yoder doesn’t focus on how hard being a new mom is, nor does she romanticize the experience. Instead, by blending the real and the surreal, Yoder shows a woman following her primal instincts and becoming her own person — or dog, I should say — outside of cultural norms. And in doing so, she finds freedom.
Lead in the belly, copper
& nickel skin in abundance
each year. Ten billion bullets