num_pages: 352
description: An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism.Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experimentsfrom the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movementthrough the lens of one millennials quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity. When Adrian Shirk's father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk she and her husbandboth adjuncts in their midtwentiesbecome his primary caretakers. The stress of daily caretaking navigating Americas broken health care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity propels Shirk into an odyssey of American utopian experiments in the hopes that they might offer a way forward. Along the way Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends artists and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making and what might be doomed. Rather than no place Shirk reframes utopia as something that according to the laws of capital and conquest shouldn't be able to existbut does anyway if only for a moment.
language: English
title: Heaven Is a Place on Earth
publisher: Counterpoint Press