Debra’s newest memoir, an assemblage of essays, explores the space between states of exile and belonging, the seemingly irresolvable dilemma of the restless homebody. Debra was born into a family of land-loving people — farmers known as the ethnic group Germans from Russia — who had emigrated from Russia to the United States between 1886 and 1911 and taken up land claims in Dakota Territory. Her grandparents tended their farms and fields, never dreaming of moving another inch away from the homes they had made. By contrast, Debra grew up a restless, imaginative child in that same agricultural place, yearning to strike out for places more interesting as soon as she was old enough to take flight.

As described by author K.L. Cook, Debra’s newest memoir is built upon “shapeshifting essays that travel from the blizzardy Midwest to sweltering Siberia, from a flooding Michigan basement to the panic-inducing Paris Catacombs, from her life as a rebellious farmer’s daughter to a hard rock musician to professor and poet laureate. Every page is full of story and insight, laced with wit, as Marquart meditates on the hungers of home and wanderlust, the way her Germans from Russia family is ‘preserved in their hyphenations,’ the poetic strangeness of basketball, the insidiousness of fracking boomtowns, and the ironies of a nostalgia called ‘heimat.’ The individual essays are astonishing, the collection as a whole profound.”