Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
My Little Donkey and Other Essays
by Martha Cooley
Catapult Books
November 2025, Hardcover, ISBN: 9781646223022, 256 pages
We live a troubled age when time passes in short, digital increments, and distractions pepper our days. Taking on the colossal topic of time, as Martha Cooley does in her recent collection, My Little Donkey and Other Essays, challenges that fleeting way of life and exchanges it for an exploration of where and how we pass our hours and days. The driving force in Cooley’s case is her move to Italy, and her essays chronicles her emigration, and the ways in which her perspective widened within time’s ruminative pace. In clean, unaffected and polished prose, Cooley invites us into her world, and many of her essays follow a braided structure that pull together threads on people, animals, age and aging, accidents, and flukes and family, as well as other moments worthy of reflection. But Cooley doesn’t limit herself to braided threads. Two of her essays deploy a flash-like form in ideas and well-researched facts that seem unrelated and dot the page – until they kaleidoscopically connect. Above all, Cooley’s clear objective is simply taking the time to indulge curiosity, to be alert, and to think, which is one of her themes, as evidenced by her previous work: her memoir Guesswork; her novels The Archivist, Thirty-Three Swoons, and Buy Me Love; and her translation, along with Antonio Romani, of Antonio Tabucchi’s Time Ages in a Hurry.
Time’s first postulant in Cooley’s book (and on the cover) is the little donkey, the asinella living on a private island in the Venetian Lagoon. Under the imagined thoughtful gaze of the animal, Cooley examines Keats’ negative capability in terms of life “back there” (the United States) and life in Italy, for she and her husband have “pulled up stakes” in the States and moved to a small village, a borgo, in northern Italy. Her reckoning with identity, displacement and re-placement mirrors that of the little donkey, rejected by his mother, who’s taken to his human counterparts on the island in the lagoon, in specific, the woman whose family owns the island. Cooley’s quiet, earnest contemplation of these topics promotes the “long view,” as she images the asinella does in looking to the woman for affection and care, and not looking at his past abandonment.
But what is involved in taking the long view? By definition, it means looking beyond the present moment and into the future, but it may also mean looking beyond the present moment and delving into the interiority of the self, where thoughts and ideas, affections and love, and experiences coalesce. The braided essay “The Box” examines life and death, independence, and cremation as Cooley considers the lives and relationships of her mother and her father, and the man and woman who lived in castle next to her house in the borgo—all dead, and as Cooley and her brother search for their mother’s boxed ashes upon their father’s death, she remembers what the woman in the castle once said: “You must get rid of what’s gone.” The ashes are gone, most likely accidently disposed of by Cooley’s father, suffering as he did from dementia. But – and here’s the real thrust of the essay once the topic of death is pushed to the side – Cooley’s mother and the woman in the castle leaned into “self-possession.” The piece truly sings when Cooley writes about women’s lives with men, and feminism.
Cooley’s scope extends beyond what might be seen as standard essay fare – she possesses a keen instinct for the deeper meaning beneath random events. Empathy and honest are her trademarks, and Time, always on display, returns in full regalia in the final essay, “If Only for a Moment,” which begins with a recollection of the time she lost control of a “capacious” car on an icy road – no one was hurt – and the ensuing delayed shock in which she relived the moment over and over. Of the skidding incident she writes, “In my memory the interval during which the car had done its about-face and slid into the guardrail (a matter of a few seconds) had seemed at once fleeting and endless.” She never tires of revisiting the moment. Intellectual inquiry follows, a vortex of modern-day ills: urbanization, overstimulation, and boredom which reveals “a rise in anxiety, restlessness…” The essay testifies to a political scientist’s notion that we are “unwilling to simply be in Time.” Yet Cooley is never unwilling to be in time, to confront it all unflinchingly and unsparingly, to connect the ticking hands on the clock to the long view.
As Sven Birkerts’ once noted, “We want the irreplaceable sense of connectedness that comes from putting words together to simulate what we carry inside.” What Cooley carries inside is the result of a full and erudite engagement with the world, and My Little Donkey is well-argued in its ask that we live with and within Time.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Reckon Review, Compulsive Reader, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.