The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer

by Mark Baumer, Blake Butler (Editor), Shane Jones (Editor)

The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. Baumer was a writer, interdisciplinary artist, activist, and “compulsive social media diarist” (The New Yorker). In her foreword to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer, Claire Donato compares the author’s writing to “Lydia Davis thumb wrestling Donald Barthleme on Vine at TGI Friday’s.” This collection, edited by Blake Butler and Shane Jones, captures a formal expansiveness which mirrors the many caps Baumer wore as a human being: activist, baseball player, straight-edge zinemaker, web content specialist, cross-country walker, son, and friend. His literary forms range from travel blogs to prose miniatures, submission cover letters to MFA applications, Tinder bios to fairy tales, and the ultimate anti-novel, a rigorous pastiche of buddies cross-country road-tripping. This final form serves as the anti-centerpiece of this generative anti-collection from the late polymath.

In January 2017, Baumer was struck and killed by an SUV in rural Florida while walking barefoot across America to raise awareness about climate change. Although he is no longer on earth, his alien sensibility and unwavering personal ethics remain.

Genres: Poetry, Environment

245 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2021

About the author

Mark Baumer was an award-winning poet and an environmental activist who trekked barefoot across the country to raise awareness about climate change.

Reviews

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe I haven't heard of this fellow until now. His absurd sense of humor is right up my alley! In fact, I seriously think he was brilliant. What a character, and what a tragic ending he had. Midway through this wonderfully selected compilation of his prolific works, I found out there was a documentary about him, "Barefoot Across America, the Mark Baumer Story". I watched it and was so delighted to see and hear the person behind the stories and poems in this book. While the documentary focuses on his journey walking barefoot across America to bring attention to climate change, it was incredibly inspiring and brought some context to the works in this book which is a collection of thoughts, poems, rants, and letters about everything you could imagine and then some. I decided to download this book on Audible and I'm so glad I did because the delivery of the narrator is so perfect and it had me laughing out loud plenty. I could only listen to about an hour of it at a time because it has a very specific vibe, but I loved it so much.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only way to respond to the world is with absurdity and heart, but it can get you killed.

[Elisabeth Sauvage-Callaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally got around to reading this great book, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while.

I never met Mark Baumer, but I know through my daughter, who was in the MFA in creative writing at the same time as Mark, and was a friend of his (she also wrote the gorgeous preface to this book), that he defied any description - he was a larger than life, shining, and incredibly kind human being. Wikipedia states that he was “an American writer, adventurer, and environmental activist,” but there was - and still is - so much more to him than that.

For those who have no clue who he was, Mark was crossing America barefoot to raise awareness about climate change (he had started this endeavor - which he had done once, in 81 days with shoes on, in 2010), when he was run over by an SUV in Florida on January 21, 2017. He was 34 years old.

There is a definite Dadaist quality to Mark’s writing, especially in the longest piece included in this book, “At Some Point in the Last Nine Billion Years: A Novel.” Indeed, how can you write sensical prose when the world around you is crumbling (more accurately, when humanity is destroying it) and no longer makes any sense? In this respect, this book is not for those who confine their readings to well-ordered alignments of words that never defy logic or a well-ordered world-view.

I particularly liked the 37 very short whimsical cover letters, all addressed to “Dear Job People.” They are hilarious. “My Personal Statement from When I Applied to Brown” is also quite unique.
Excerpts from Mark’s “Barefoot Across America” blog are incredibly poignant, they encapsulate his despair at the state of the United States at the time of Trump’s election. Things could not possibly get worse – but, alas, they did.

A final word: If you do not know much about Mark Baumer, but would like to get to know more about him, watch Julie Sokolow's wonderful documentary on him - titled "Barefoot: The Mark Baumer Story."

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I tried to look at my own brain. I asked it if it was experiencing any sense of pleasure or it it was developing a medium-sized experience that would consume my ability to ever experience anything ever again."

[Griffin Emerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I felt such a kinship with another writer. What happened in 2017 is nothing short of tragic.

[Dinara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it. It was weird, estranged, and I laughed a lot. I would reread some pages for sure