At Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty , a motley crew of scientists walks the mudflats to study fossils in the making. This reputedly dead sea is home to tar seeps, pools of raw oil (nicknamed ‘death traps’) that act as a preservative, encasing organisms as they were in life. In this spare landscape, an intricate web of life unfurls. Halophiles―salt-hungry microorganisms―tint the brackish water pink and orange; crystals of gypsum stud the ground, glistening underfoot; and pelicans and other migratory birds stop for a crucial rest. Barn owls and seagulls flirt with their prey around the seeping constellations, sometimes falling prey to the oil themselves. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, a kind of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car as she walked in a crosswalk―a manmade asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing coalesced. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake’s entangled lives. How do we move beyond narrow concepts of wounded and healed, the beautiful and the ugly, to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledges and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps contemplates the ways that others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than this region alone. As Henderson witnesses scientists, arts curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering a meditation on environmental healing across the planet. Henderson interweaves her journey with her own vivid photographs of tar seeps and pelican death assemblages, historic maps and contemporary art, as a wayfinding guide for exploring places of our own. Praise for Ugliness: A Cultural History "Gretchen Henderson’s work is “wide-ranging and frequently illuminating.” —  New Yorker "A multifarious book . . . Engagingly written and copiously illustrated.” — Choice “Henderson closely observes various cases of ugliness, wandering through centuries with a keen eye, nose, ear, and mouth.” —  Rumpus “A provocative book [that] forces us to reflect on our tastes and fears, our social conventions, and our everyday notions of justice.” — Literary Review “A fascinating meditation on a slippery subject.” — Guardian Praise for Ugliness: A Cultural History “In her wide-ranging and frequently illuminating study, Gretchen Henderson traces the connections―some obvious, but many not at all―between aesthetic norms and cultural anxieties, from antiquity to the present day. Henderson’s totemic character is Polyphemus, the half-divine Cyclops whose appearance in Homer’s Odyssey is one of the poem’s most harrowing episodes. Set apart by his ‘non-Greek race, enormous size, congenital disorder and demigod status’ (or, to put it more broadly, by his difference, hybridity, and hypervisibility), the monster exemplifies the lasting tendency to equate appearance with less tangible values. . . . Henderson artfully links the Polyphemus myth to the ‘hierarchy of species’ found in Aristotle’s ‘Generation of Animals.’ Aristotle’s ‘downhill slope’ is topped by men, followed by women, then devolves into ‘hybrid offspring’ like satyrs and fauns. This motion, from powerful to exoticized, illustrates the trick―later employed at the height of phrenological and eugenic crazes―of forcing the worth, and, ultimately, the humanity, of certain individuals to correspond with often arbitrary aesthetic categories. . . . Beauty does more than simply seduce: it masks and perfumes, freezes moral categories in place. Ugliness―with all its seams unconcealed―is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” ― New Yorker “A fascinating meditation on a slippery subject.” ― Guardian “Henderson approaches her topic through an impressive number of examples, spanning disciplines, mediums, usages, geographies, and chronologies, and including works of fine and popular art, architecture, mythology, cultural moments, historical facts, and human individuals and groups. The book offers an anecdotal survey of what people have termed ‘ugly’ in various contexts. . . . The author manages to take the discussion of ugliness into its own territory, beyond a mere opposition to beauty. This book provides an engaging and accessible cultural history that is informative and entices the reader to see things in a different perspective.” ― History Today “ Ugliness: A Cultural History is a provocative book