Details the author’s experiences after leaving the East coast to live on a 10-acre farm called La Junta in northern New Mexico, where he built a house, fenced in land, lived, and wrote.

Birds of Sorrow: Notes from a River Junction in Northern New Mexico

Biographies & Memoirs

Ireland, Tom

Arts & Literature

Zephyr Press

Details the author’s experiences after leaving the East coast to live on a 10-acre farm called La Junta in northern New Mexico, where he built a house, fenced in land, lived, and wrote.

The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage

At every moment, within our bodies and all around us, trillions of microscopic combatants are waging a war that shapes our health and life on Earth. Countless times per second, viruses known as phages attack and destroy bacteria while leaving all other life forms, including us, unscathed. Vastly outnumbering the viruses that do us harm, phages power ecosystems, drive evolutionary innovation, and harbor a remarkable capacity to heal life-threatening infections when conventional antibiotics fail. Yet most of us have never heard of them, thinking of viruses only as enemies to be feared. The Good Virus prompts us to reconsider, and to discover, how these viruses could save countless lives if we can learn to harness their extraordinary abilities. Taking us inside the ongoing quest to use phages' powers for good, Tom Ireland introduces us to the brilliant, often eccentric, scientists who have fought to realize phages' potential in the face of doubt and political intrigue. We meet the renegade French-Canadian scientist who discovered phages and pioneered their use as medicine over a century ago, leading them to be hailed as the world's first genuine antibiotic years before penicillin. We learn why, in some pockets of the former Soviet Union, drinking a vial of phages remains as common as taking an over-the-counter drug. We follow the intrepid scientists and doctors now racing to make "phage therapy" work worldwide as the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria grows ever more urgent--even as other researchers uncover how phages bolster our everyday immunity, help generate the oxygen we breathe, and furnish the origins for breakthrough technologies like CRISPR. Unveiling the hidden rulers of the microbial world and celebrating the surprising power of viruses to heal, not harm, The Good Virus forever changes how we see nature's most maligned life forms.

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

W.W.Norton&Company

Girl on Wheels (Malinding Village)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Independently published

Literary Nonfiction. "Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life," wrote Willa Cather. She wasn't just kidding. The perpetual conflict between our need for others and our need to be alone underlies each of the first-person essays in this collection, which voice the difficulties, satisfactions, and absurdities of finding one's way in the social wilderness. The author takes a sentimental journey to New York, his hometown, remembered from a safe distance; and visits faraway places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where he talks about love and fidelity with the ghost of his dead friend; and northern Thailand, where he broods over his lack of a girlfriend and encounters "the man" of the title. Back home, love strikes with no less ferocity than it always has. He and his girlfriend lie awake at night and talk about the weightier implications of their love: whose vacuum cleaner will they keep when they live together? Ireland, whose work has been called "delightfully idiosyncratic and universally human" (Publishers Weekly), writes in the preface, "I often long for something in the presence of other people.... I'm longing for the person I am when I'm alone, who unfortunately can't join us. These essays are an attempt to subvert the dilemma."

The Man Who Gave His Wife Away

History & Criticism

Tres Chicas Books

Literary Nonfiction. THE HOUSEHOLD MUSE, titled after a collection of piano pieces by Darius Milhaud, is a correspondence between two writers who live together. These short essays, written back and forth over the course of a year, are concerned with "whatever was closest on any particular day, although what was closest might be long ago or far away:" peach saplings, former loves, political mayhem, mice in the compost, refugees, a dying friend, a melodeon, a marsh hawk by the railroad tracks. The writers--a California poet drawn into the San Francisco poetry scene in the 1970s and a New Yorker who fled university life for New Mexico during the same era--met in the state's Artists in the Schools program and coupled up many years and several divorces later. In "My Whatever," Tom Ireland writes, "If you still have it, please destroy the letter I wrote to you before we got together...something along the lines of, 'I want to possess you and be possessed by you.' I was out of my mind with desire, whereas now, I just love you." Anne Valley-Fox replies in "Not Married," "Maybe I don't trust myself as one half of a couple; maybe I don't trust husbands; maybe you and I relish the renegade feeling of living on the other side of the matrimonial tracks. We could change our minds tomorrow. For today, I choose to be with you, I do." The collection, completed a few months before the coronavirus outbreak, ends with the birth of a grandson, an event that invites the two to consider the time they have left, however short or long, and how to make the most of it. "So yes," she writes, "let's bet our lives on human kindness and microbe-eating earthworms, and love each other like there's no tomorrow."

The Household Muse

Valley-Fox, Anne

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Ireland, Tom