Posted in Bereavement, Chapbook, Cougars, Grief, Literary Inspiration, Mountain lions, Poetry, Writing, tagged blur, cougars, finishing line press, jake, losing jacob, loss, mountain lions, poetry, wild thing in our known world on April 25, 2013 | 5 Comments »
Your father coming
home late—a cougar
vaulted the road,
blazed up the driveway.
He floored it,
but the lion outran
his highbeams, vanished
on the hillside.
Of course I thought of you.
Who sprang
fully formed into our lives
and died.
All our love to you, Jacob Darsie Putnam: 4/25-28/1989.
****
(“Blur” originally appeared in Poetry East. It is forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press.)
Posted in Chapbook, Environment, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Writing, tagged climate change, endangered rivers, finishing line press, global warming, homesickness, living at altitude, living in nature, lost valley, poetry, wild thing in our known world on April 22, 2013 | 1 Comment »
The Colorado River, which I happen to live beside, is the #1 most endangered River in America. I’m surprised, but relieved, to learn that the other major waterway, the Rio Grande, which also rises here in our watershed state, did not make the top ten.
We think of our rivers as the source of life, of livelihood, of food and water. But when I watch the whitewater, the meltwater, coming down over and around the rocks in the mountain streams, what I see is light.
Light released from the place where it was stored during the dark of the winter.
It’s another reason why I’m sorry to hear that glaciers too are getting smaller over time.
First, that air, not burdened
with oxygen, was full
of light.
Light caught the undersides
of ponderosa needles
and the ragged,
reddish bark of their trunks.
Kim’s chickens feathered
in the silvery
light of the aspen branches.
I lay beside the river
on my favorite flat
rock of old, and the river
brought light
from the glaciers.
A bird came to bathe
in the spray once. No idea
what kind of bird,
but I remember it,
it is caught
in my mind.
Light like ashes unfurling,
smoke released
by light.
There are things
you take for granted,
a high kitchen
window opening to light
careering off cliffs,
the mountainside
a terrarium, pines
springing
from your countertops.
******
(Originally appeared on Western Views, the blog of Western Resource Advocates. You can also find another poem of mine, Global Warming Scenarios: Rocky Mountain Region on the same site.
Lost Valley is forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance help the publisher calculate the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Posted in Chapbook, Cougars, Literary Inspiration, Mountain lions, Poetry, tagged chapbook, cougar, flushed, lioncaller, mountain lion, poetry, predators, wild thing in our known world, wildlife reintroduction on April 8, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve lived in Colorado’s lion country for more than thirty years. Possibly, depending on what stories you believe about where and when they’ve reintroduced themselves in Northern New England, I’ve been in their territory my whole life.
Flushed
Running the Highline,
a fleeting thought
of the threat of lions,
turn my head to find
the dogs chasing one.
Tail stretched out long,
a comet through my heart.
It ran; the dogs were safe,
just this painful weight
of coincidence
to bear back down
the mountain.
thought and then
the conjured beast,
the liquid leap
to the tree; again
the long run down,
through all those years
of running through woods,
sensing but not seeing.
(Originally appeared in The Adirondack Review, in slightly different form. Forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance orders secure the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Find me on Twitter at @lioncaller.
Posted in Chapbook, Life Changes, Outdoor activities, Poetry, Writing, tagged cairn stone, finishing line press, parenting, parenting teens, poetry, teen communication styles, wild thing in our known world on April 3, 2013 | 1 Comment »
Sometimes teenagers don’t talk to you. Sometimes this goes on for weeks, months. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of the usual adolescent grunting and shrugging. Because sometimes you don’t even get that.
Sometimes they don’t want to talk to you. They truly seem to have decided that they hate your guts.
In such times, a mother may come to think it is all over. Time is flying by. Even if some healing takes place, many critical months and years may be lost. All the reassurances of her friends—it’ll work out, he’s a good kid, he’ll be fine, all that love you gave him when was three is in there somewhere—feel hollow. The mother knows very well that sometimes it doesn’t work out.
She has no way of telling which statistic she’ll be, which her son will be.
And then one day, perhaps while she’s lying injured, her son goes for a hike. In the evening he comes to her room. The rock he lays on her pillow feels warm from the sun, from his pocket, from the hand he’s kept in that pocket.
Many years later, whenever she fingers it on her desk, she swears it still feels warm.
Cairn Stone
This is the rock he lifted
to lay upon a cairn
in a high place.
This rock, warmed by the near sun,
felt right, somehow, in his hand.
He decided to carry it down
to his mother, who lay in bed,
recovering.
It is so easy to please
a mother. Just to think of her
for a moment, from a high place,
and to carry that thought to her
in the form of a stone.
(Originally published in Paper Street. Forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance orders secure the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Posted in Books, Chapbook, Coyotes, Literary Inspiration, Outdoor activities, Poetry, Writing, tagged coyote, finishing line press, kelli russell agodon, paul thomas murphy, Poems, poetry, poetry chapbook, publication, wild thing in our known world on March 26, 2013 | 2 Comments »
Way back in the early days of this blog I posted about measurable publishing progress. Even so it’s sometimes hard to feel as though anything’s happening. A story is accepted by a reasonably prestigious journal. Then publication is delayed; the editors combine a couple of issues. When it finally arrives, there are so many stories and poems crammed into one magazine, you wonder if anyone ever reads the story you polished for five years, or if the whole thing is about the credit in the cover letter for the next piece you send out.
But.
Roll it on. Believe in it anyway. I stood up and read the first half of my most recently published story out loud in front of a thousand skeptical people last year and it went down pretty well, I thought.
So, regardless of what happens next, I am excited that my first poetry chapbook is coming into print right now. 
Over two dozen of my poems have appeared in a variety of journals. This is more than enough to anchor a couple of chapbooks, perhaps even a book-length manuscript. But until I had a fellowship last year, I didn’t have the headspace to pull such a project together.
Finishing Line Press is bringing out Wild Thing in Our Known World in June. It’s available for preorder right now. I wrote about how this works over on my Poetry page, but in a nutshell, Finishing Line, like a lot of small presses these days, uses advance orders to set the press-runs. If we get 100 preorders, they’ll print 500 copies. If we get fewer than that, the press-run will be significantly smaller, and I’ll be depressed.
I think most authors feel a little Amway-ish about the preorder thing, honestly, but that’s how it is now. We have to schlepp our books whether we like it or not. We all have do some of our own marketing and PR-ing—half the time even our cover art and our editing—no matter how much we’d like to hole up and just write.
But I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t believe in what I was writing about, because the amount of energy it takes to write stuff is ridiculous.
If I can get up and read something in front of a thousand people, I can ask you to please buy my poetry book. It costs $12 and the discounted shipping is $2.49. It must not suck too much if the people at Finishing Line pulled it out of a huge pile of manuscripts sent by hopeful poets and decided to publish it.
(How many hopeful poets are there? Well, I went to a panel discussion at AWP in Denver a few years ago. AWP is a conference for people who are getting or have already got a master’s degree in creative writing, including in poetry. Thousands upon thousands of people attend. This talk was on how to assemble a poetry book manuscript. It was given in one of those hotel banquet rooms where they can take out an intervening wall and turn it into a ballroom. They’d removed the wall, and it was still standing room only. There are kabillions of hopeful poets out there, that’s how many.)
A couple of people have said some nice things about this chapbook. Not to drop names or anything, but the award-winning poet Kelli Russell Agodon, who’s been featured on A Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, not to mention in many other prestigious places, and IMO is headed for superstardom, wrote a blurb.
A second blurb comes from historian Paul Thomas Murphy. He’s the author of the New York Times Notable Book, Shooting Victoria, which is about how seven attempts on Queen Victoria’s life probably saved the very concept of the British Monarchy. I want my work to be taken seriously in the literary community, but I want it to be accessible to thoughtful non-poets as well. I asked Paul for his opinion.
Then there’s Coyote. I had one last day to come up with cover art for my book. I had no money for this. I took my son’s camera and headed out for a day of backcountry skiing. Around here that means around 2300 feet of vertical climbing, not even considering the distance traveled or the difficulty of the terrain.
But the shot was easy. There was a deer in the ditch, roadkill, a sad metaphor that haunts the book, and Coyote was waiting in the field. Sitting there in broad daylight. Wild thing in our known world. I’d titled the manuscript long before, after a line in one of the poems.
I’m not a good photographer, but I think that’s all to the best in this case.
I got back in the car and went skiing. On the mountain, I met Neil Bennett, a professional photographer. If my shot didn’t work out, he said I could use some of his wildlife shots for free. I may well do that with the next book. But for Wild Thing in Our Known World, it seemed that Coyote had given me another blurb.
Isn’t that enough for you?
Posted in Books, Poetry, Reading, Writing, tagged Alina Brodsky, Cloud Atlas, David Foster Wallace, DT Max, Every Riven Thing, Ilya Kaminsky, James Scully, Josef Skvorecky, Julian Barnes, Katherine Towler, Kathleen Flenniken, Lauren Grodstein, Lazarus Project, Lionel Shriver, Marriage Plot, Noonday Demon, Patricia Limerick, recommended reading, Richard Ford, Tom Perrotta, Winter's Bone, Yellow Birds on January 15, 2013 | 2 Comments »
This year I had more time to read than usual and so I have a lot to say. Again, I’m listing the books that popped to me of those I read in 2012; they may or may not have been published in the last year. Also, as usual, I probably forgot to OneNote several striking books as the year unfolded; on the other hand, this post can’t go on forever.
Fiction
Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. The movie mapped pretty closely to the book, but this is well worth reading for details and a kind of inner beauty no movie could capture. My sister, who has trouble believing in fiction, posted a request on Facebook for a list of books that were realistic. This book is full of characters we grew up with in New Hampshire, even if it’s set in the Ozarks. And I see them in meth-land a little west of me in Colorado, too. The main character Woodrell chooses to follow is the older sister in a family torn by drugs and mental illness. She’s the one, appearing in so many dysfunctional families, who holds it together. How she does so is poignantly drawn.
The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon. I’ve yet to find a piece of Hemon’s, short
or long, fiction or non-, that I haven’t loved. This novel takes us back to a time when the only desired immigrants in America were northern European ones, ideally speaking English, though German and Scandinavian Protestants were tolerated. Jews and those of Eastern European and Mediterranean descent were viewed as are many view Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants today. Good citizens were terrified of anarchists, and political cartoons often caricatured bearded men with bombs. Sound familiar? This wasn’t so long ago, round about 1900, 1910.
A Friend of the Family, Lauren Grodstein. Just a good, hypnotic read. Extremely well plotted, crafted, with a lot to think about in terms of motivation and psychology. Moves fast—an escape read with a literary level of characterization and writing.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Alina Bronsky. Another fast-mover, psychologically taunting and haunting. Psychopathic narrator you can’t look away from, one of the worst mothers and grandmothers you’ve ever met. Also hilarious.
Little Children, Tom Perrotta. For some reason, this is the first Perrotta novel I’ve ever read, and I plan to read a lot more. I don’t typically like novels about suburbia, but this manages to dig so deeply into male/female roles and expectations in our society right now—his sense of how women view men, their disappointments and desires is so dead on. And his explication of the confusion some men feel about the redefinition of their roles his interesting too.
The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky. Stalin gave himself this title, and Skvorecky, an exiled Czech writer, appropriated it for his grimly humorous novel. One takeaway: rednecks are everywhere, and Hitler and Stalin took advantage of the ignorance of the peasantry. It wouldn’t take much in our country, either.
The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides. Nothing original in recommending this one. I’m not sure why, of the three smart kids at Brown who make up the main characters, it’s the girl who is the lesser light and the boys who are the geniuses, but let’s let that slide. I also would have liked more discussion of the marriage plot itself—i.e., what Madeleine was actually arguing in her paper. It seems odd to me that this wasn’t directly discussed. However, the insight into Leonard’s bipolar disease is exquisite, and not adequately credited, IMO, among reviewers. I found the book engrossing overall and stayed up late reading it.
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell. Again, a first for me from an accomplished author. Mitchell’s books are said to be so diverse I wasn’t sure where to start, but with the movie coming out I decided to read this one. I thought the book was strong for the first third or so, but I wasn’t sure why he was considered to be SO great. Until about halfway through the book. Then I realized I was in the hands of a genius. So hang in there; it’s well worth it. There’s a pivot point after which you are not coming back.
The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers. Yes, there were places where I thought he should have let a metaphor stand and not explained it. It’s still a powerful book. I hope there are more to come, both from this author and from other writers with something to say about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Canada, Richard Ford. Another strong book by one of my favorite writers. Reviewer Ron Charles said he thought this one should have won either the NBA or the Pulitzer, I forget which, and I agree, whichever it was. A few annoying quirks, but overall an engrossing book.
The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver. I’d been putting this off for years
because I didn’t think it could measure up to We Need to Talk About Kevin. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a complex, fascinating book. What Shriver does well is put you inside the heads of women you don’t really like being inside the heads of, and yet they are very interesting heads to be in.
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes. I didn’t find this book as confusing as many people seemed to. Like The Marriage Plot, it’s a reexamination of a collegiate triangle that included at least one unbalanced person. The narrator isn’t reliable, but he’s aware of this fact and trying to face up to it. I hardly think it’s worth mentioning that a narrator is unreliable anyway. Isn’t that something postmodernism established? Isn’t that irrefutable? I don’t think we can ever return to the concept of a reliable storyteller. Anyone who thinks they know the whole story is either deluded or lying. Anyone who believes them is either naïve or an idiot. That goes for movies and news stories and presidential speeches and everything.
Non-Fiction
Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. This speaks to what I just said about the Barnes book. An essay by D’Agata, which appeared in McSweeney’s (I think, or else The Believer), surrounded by arguments between the author and his fact-checker. Since the essay is a work of creative non-fiction, sometimes you agree with the author that the fact-checker is being a bit ridiculous about every little thing. On the other hand, is it really a matter of the rhythm of the sentence whether a town has twenty or twenty-one bars? (I don’t remember if this was an exact item of dispute, but it was something like this.) It seems to me that creative non-fiction shouldn’t stretch matters of actual fact, or should stop and discuss it, reflexively, when it does. Or, as in gonzo journalism, it should just be clear from the nature of the piece that it’s totally out of bounds from the start. The point is not that you tell the truth or don’t, or that there is no truth (I actually think there is, but that it’s hard to know all of it), but that you discuss what you do and do not know. And THEN—it turns out that Fingal and D’Agata ramped up their original argument, or so I read somewhere, in order to make this book more “interesting.” So it too is a bunch of bullshit. If you’re interested in matters of this sort, this book is worth reading on a number of levels, and with lots of salt. I’ve got Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point on my shelf, as it seems to be a similar exploration, only a lot more personal and more honest. But I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t recommend it.
Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick. I’m way late to the party with this one. Limerick got a MacArthur award partly on the strength of this work. A revisionist look at the history of the American West that’s now foundational. And anything but reductionist. In a different way, it’s also a meditation on truth and how we access it.
The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon. Who wouldn’t kill for this title? If I recall correctly (read this early in the year) it comes from one of the Desert Fathers, trying to manage despair while meditating in the wilderness in the early days of Christianity. About as comprehensive, compassionate, and personal a look at depression as you can hope to find.
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, DT Max. Another unbeatable title—came 
from the subject’s, David Foster Wallace’s work. I’m sure this is the first of many biographies of Wallace, but it’s a hell of a start.
Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, James Scully. Maybe if you grow up with a poet in your family you don’t get around to reading enough of his work. For some reason I just read this book this year and found it riveting. Also helpful, especially the title essay, which is about shaking up poetry in form as well as function. Like Adrienne Rich and others, Scully argues that poetry ought to be a form of activism. His life and writing have often mirrored that belief.
Into the Whirlwind, Eugenia Ginsberg. One of the finer accounts of life in the maelstrom of the Stalin purges. Ended in a weird place. I just learned there’s a sequel, which I intend to read soon. I’m dark that way.
A God in the House, Poets Talk About Faith, Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler. I wound up giving this book as a gift quite frequently in the past year. Kaminsky and Towler interviewed a diverse group of renowned poets. Not all of them specifically believe in God or in a monotheistic God/Western God. Each segment ends with a poem on the subject of faith or the search for faith. It’s a powerful book; not predictable or schmaltzy.
Poetry
Every Riven Thing, Christian Wiman. There are some pieces in this book that make you think, okay, this guy (the editor of Poetry magazine) doesn’t need to write another thing if he doesn’t want to.
Nightworks, Marvin Bell. This was a re-read. But it’s amazing to look through a collection that spans a lot of an author’s career and think, wow. What strength, going all the way back to the beginning.
Angel in Flames, James Scully. What I just said, though not a re-read—this collection representing a lifetime of work and translation came out recently. As a young poet, Scully won the Lamont Award. He taught at the University of Connecticut. He was invited to come to Chile by President Allende. When Allende was deposed in a coup, Scully and his young family went anyway, working to assist guerillas who opposed the brutal (and US-supported) dictator Pinochet. There’s an underground worldliness to Scully’s work that a lot of US poetry just doesn’t have.
Plume, Kathleen Flenniken. This book is thematically integrated based on the author’s experience growing up in a community where everyone worked at a nuclear plant and then becoming a scientist working at the Hanford nuclear plant herself.
Posted in Art, Books, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Reading, Writing, tagged Book of the Dead Man, Marvin Bell, poetry, Resurrected Dead Man poems, writing advice, writing workshops on December 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Some years ago I took a master class with the poet Marvin Bell. I’d been
galvanized by an interview I read in American Poetry Review. The interview (not linked) was accompanied by a selection of Bell’s Resurrected Dead Man poems. I was only starting to take myself seriously as a poet—i.e., to give myself permission to call myself one. Many people who write fiction regard poetry as something sacred that they have either failed at or “could never do.” And it’s often the case that a poet has tried to write fiction and was told by some teacher that he or she sucked at it, and wound up writing poetry instead.
And some poets and teachers of poetry have strong feelings about the division of art forms. Bell himself has said that writers of prose and poetry do very different things. Novelists must put stuff in, while poets leave things out.
Yet, here I was, writing stories and piling up pages that I thought might one day turn out to be novels. And here were these poems, or things that might be worked into poems, dropping into the various piles on my desk. Was I supposed to cut them up and flush them down the toilet like unwanted children? Bury them in the backyard in the dark of the moon?
I didn’t think so.
I found the Dead Man poems and their sequels so exciting because of the way they related to sentences. Every line was a sentence, and every sentence was a line. The narrative drive, the energy gripped me—I paced, I talked to myself on walks in the woods—and yet many of the poems talked about the end of things, they discussed what happened when you emptied (after considerable agony) the possibilities.
An MFA was logistically and financially out of reach, so I promised myself I would take a workshop with Bell if I could find one. I did, at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.
Some key advice I encountered there, not included below: Examine the strength of the line. If you had to pull a line out of the poem, what would it sound like on its own? Sometimes you need a crappy line just to get to the next one, and sometimes bad sections help the great ones stand out, IMO—a too-polished workshop piece can sometimes be bland. But on the other hand what good are lines like these:
or were
is to see
over and of
All from a recent collection of a highly respected American poet (the collection also contains work so stunning I don’t care if he never writes another poem).
Anyway, Bell recently sent me a list of 32 points of advice he likes to give to writers. He says he was asked to write an essay, but he was too lazy and came up with this list instead. I was going to write a blog on an entirely different topic, but I was too lazy. So I’ll post this list instead, with his permission. I may not agree with every point, but this guy has been at this for a long time and has work to his name that I look to again and again. Here’s the core of his philosophy about writing.
32 Statements About Writing Poetry
(Work-in-Progress)
1. Every poet is an experimentalist.
2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
3. There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
4. The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
5. Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
6. You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
7. Originality is a new amalgam of influences.
8. Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
9. The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
10. Autobiography rots. The life ends, the vision remains.
11. A poem listens to itself as it goes.
12. It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.
13. Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.
14. Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.
15. Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
16. A short poem need not be small.
17. Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.
18. Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.
19. You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed.
20. At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them.
21. The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.
22. What they say "there are no words for"–that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.
23. One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.
24. The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.
25. Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.
26. A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.
27. A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.
28. Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.
29. Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.
30. A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.
31. This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry:
Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.
32. Art is a way of life, not a career.
- Marvin Bell
Used by permission.
Posted in Environment, Poetry, Writing, tagged climate change, climate impacts, global warming, renewable energy, smart water, western resource advocates on September 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I’m extremely honored that Western Resource Advocates has decided to post one of my poems on its blog, Western Views: “Global Warming Scenarios: Rocky Mountain Region.”
Some years ago I directed communications for Western Resource Advocates, an environmental law and policy organization active in eight states. WRA works on good policy, whether it’s renewable energy standards, which they helped co-author, better transmission planning to support renewable energy, site analysis that takes into account historical, Native, aesthetic, and production concerns, smart water planning that helps avoid the need for dams, and sound forest and public lands management that keep the wild in wilderness.
While I worked there I read a very disturbing report on climate change authored by GW Bush’s Department of Defense. It went region by region, projecting impacts across the country. The images haunted me; eventually the above poem resulted.
I can’t locate that original report, but I did find a newer one from the DoD that was pretty interesting. Regarding the other impacts mentioned in the poem, a paper from the NRDC covers snow, aspen, and glaciers. You can find out what’s happening to the pika from the National Park Service. And the New York Times ran a good piece on how trout habitats are changing.
I hope you don’t mind checking out the poem, and while you’re at it, exploring some of the other writing on Western Views. Maybe you’ll hop over to WRA’s main site as well.
Note: “Global Warming Scenarios:…” was originally published, in somewhat different form, in Weber: The Contemporary West.
Posted in Grief, Life Changes, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, tagged depression, flow, inspiration, longing, poetry, spirituality on May 1, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Posted in Books, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Reading, Writing, tagged book choices 2011, great reads, recommended reading on January 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Once again these are the books that stood out for me among those I read this past year. They were not necessarily published in 2011; many of them appeared decades ago, in fact.
Fiction
ose in “Brokeback Mountain.” This novel came out several years earlier. And it’s better, IMO. Not that there isn’t room for lots of this kind of thing in a big state like Wyoming. 
what’s wrong with it. His books are so interesting and engrossing that you come away satisfied even if the plot made no sense or the characters were slightly impossible. They’re supposed to be thrillers, but he takes his time building place and character, and it’s always worth it. His writing is pretty high-quality. Every once in a while, it’s as if he says to himself, oh, crap, I’m supposed to be writing a thriller, better stick in a sex scene on a kitchen counter. And so you have this awkward sex scene on a kitchen counter (nothing against kitchen sex, just awkward kitchen sex). In the end, though, you learn so much about whatever it is he’s writing about, plus the setting, that you don’t care. Okay, I don’t. The Good Son is about Afghanistan. 
in the 90s. Yeah, baby, it’s still beautiful. This may be one of the most under-noted and –appreciated story collections of the last century. Maybe that’s because they’re almost more like long prose poems than stories. Today, this form would be welcomed, perhaps even elevated over a conventional story. But then it was fairly radical to call this a short story. James Galvin’s novel-or-whatever-it-was, The Meadow, was out, and people were excited, but they weren’t sure what to do. What I like about Sworn before Cranes is the way he’s unafraid to delight in what he sees down in the pockets and folds in the plains. He’s a magic man. Where Frazier is at pains to show the braided glory and seaminess surrounding Native Americans since the Conquest, Gilfillan as a poet and naturalists has interests in sound and imagery. It’s good to read them both in the same year. Nonfiction
r interactions. About why poachers poach. About the few people in Russia who are trying to protect the environment and why. And about how not just dead tigers but also the whole Siberian ecosystem is getting smuggled to China and made into stuff we’re buying in Home Depot. With the personality and menace of This Particular Tiger on every page. 
er’s kids? The contents of his household? But Frazier is a good, entertaining writer and it’s no skin off your nose to keep reading, so do it. In the end it comes together with a big, WHOA, holy shit that was intense. Nose skinned. 
women and children. A 17-year-girl was killed. The event was filmed. The people who filmed it knew what to do—release it to the press. But most of the climbing community wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could stay on China’s good side and keep climbing in the area. The book digs into the story of the refugees, gives the official Chinese version, and explores the different climbers’ opinions. But overall you wind up thinking a lot about relative versus absolute morality. This isn’t even the Holocaust, where you might have to choose between your life and someone else’s, or between your child’s life and someone else’s. This is about whether you get a sponsorship for a being a jock. 
herself caught up in the conflict associated with the industrialization of that landscape for gas and oil development. In the life story of a young cowboy and roughneck, she epitomizes this tension. It’s not unlike The Tiger (above) in some respects. Fuller’s controlled but essentially gonzo journalistic style makes these characters sympathetic and gives the lie to narratives offered up by writers like Annie Proulx, which make the same landscapes look ugly and the same people bestial. One question is what are we going to do about the fact that we are turning our last wildernesses into grids full of drilling rigs, powerlines, switching stations, dusty dirt roads, and tanker trucks going up and down all day long? With little concern for worker safety as we go… 
one depicted in City of Light, above. Cleaveland went East for her schooling and it must have been a shock to deal with the routines and proprieties people in the East were bothering with. Something I’d never heard before: there was a messianic figure who came to Denver, walking out of the Mohave desert. Francis Schlatter was so charismatic that special trains were sent to Denver full of people who wanted to see him and be healed by him. He disappeared, only to show up on the Morley ranch in New Mexico, where he dictated his life story to Agnes’s mother. The title he chose is wonderful: The Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper. However, although she recounts this tale about Schlatter, I’m struck by how little personal reflection on God comes through in these memoirs I’m reading about life in the American West around this time.
Poetry
ar. 
