Karmic Traces ─ 1993-1999

In Karmic Traces, Weinberger's third collection from New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author's personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the handover to China, as well as on imagined voyages in a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And, in "The Falls," the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.