Suzannah Lessard, author of “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape"

Suzannah Lessard signs her book, “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape,” on Saturday after reading from it at the Rensselaerville Library. “Once the world was wide,” she read. “Now we live in collapsed space: the chip in our pocket.” Lessard wrote much of her book in her Rensselaerville cottage and considers the meaning of its landscape and how that sense of place has changed. Lessard said she “went all over in random ways” — to a southern slave cabin, to the McDonald ranch house in New Mexico where the first nuclear weapon was assembled — and thought that would be her book, but the journey turned out to be her education. This week’s podcast records her reading — sometimes poetic; other times, philosophical — and her many-layered answers to questions from the score of listeners as she shares the way she is reimagining our world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.