You haven’t really experienced how weird and beautiful the world is until you see it through Lauren Haldeman’s eyes. These beautiful diary comics by the award-winning poet offer a fresh, humorous, and emotionally resonant perspective on the wonders and weirdness of everyday life.

Following the artist and her family—three humans, three cats, and one dog—through twelve months of morning coffees, late night TV, laundry folding, and walks in the woods, Wild That We’re Alive invites the reader to marvel at the wonder and weirdness of the ordinary.

Depicting herself as a wolf on the page, Lauren embraces the moniker “Momboy”: part responsible child-rearing adult and part lovable feral kid. In her particularity, she is all of us: grappling with anxieties, awed by the little things, and ready to throw her hands up and laugh or cry in the face of social media, squirrels, politics, and figuring out what to have for dinner. In these pages, Lauren intersperses her diary comics, pithy observations, and philosophical musings with a handful of painterly full-bleed illustrations to show the passing of the seasons. Like a Midwestern, sweatpants-wearing Roz Chast, Lauren portrays herself and those around her with affectionate self-deprecation—occasionally grumpy, rarely pretty, but always real. For fans of Lucy Knisley’s portrayals of life with both cats and children and Julia Wertz’s explorations of the ways we struggle and succeed in the work of caring for ourselves and others, Wild That We’re Alive is a debut book from an exciting new voice in comics.

Author Biography

Lauren Haldeman is the author of three books of poetry, including Instead of Dying, winner of the Colorado Prize, and one graphic memoir, Team Photograph (Sarabande 2022), which Rachel Yoder called “a brilliant and original book from a wildly creative voice.” Her previous work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Colorado Review, Fence, The Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Lauren is a recipient of the Iowa Artist Fellowship, the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country.

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