"An ode to familial love, Anxious Attachments documents relationships with care and vulnerability and with a constant apprehension of what is at stake: when you love, you have something to lose." —Entropy Magazine

"Beth Alvarado writes so clearly and honestly about some of the best and worst things that can happen to a person that her essay collection seems like a marvelous gift." —Francine Prose, author of 1974

"Humility is at the heart of this collection of personal essays on grief and partnership, parenting and spirituality, addiction and illness, intercultural family dynamics, and environmental racism. A capacious subjectivity keeps widening as Beth Alvarado’s unlikely life gets accounted here, but most moving to me is the self-understanding that deepens as the book unfolds, the gradual self-determination that makes solidarity and love more possible. —Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies

"Alvarado’s gorgeous essays evoke the fluidity and awe of an underwater journey. She offers us a tour of grief—its causes, its cultural conditions, its grasp. We move across time as though every beat of history were immediately available alongside the present moment. In delineating, with devotion, with humor, losses that are at once ordinary and extraordinary, material and supernatural, she offers the reader a chance to better see what’s right in front of them. This book is an act of generosity, of friendship, of remembrance. I felt my head turned by it, encouraged to see my everyday loves with wider eyes." —Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Borealis

"Alvarado’s essays are devotions. The grace of spirit as she narrates and comes to terms with her considerable losses—as well as her transformative loves—is astonishing, equaled only by the expressive grace of her writing."—Boyer Rickel, author of Morgan

Beth Alvarado is the author of four books: Anxious Attachments, Julian at the Borderlands, Anthropologies: A Family Memoir, and Not a Matter of Love and other stories. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in Literature from Stanford University. Her essays and stories have been published in many fine journals including Guernica, The Sun, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, and Ploughshares. Her essays have twice been chosen as Notable by Best American Essays. Beth is on the editorial board of a new contemporary Chicanx anthology sponsored by Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and the Black Earth Institute. Beth lived with her late husband and two children in the Sonoran Borderlands for much of her life. She now lives in Bend, Oregon, where she teaches prose at the OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.