Ron Rash’s latest, The Caretaker, is a haunted fable of love and loss
…passages describing the landscapes of western North Carolina. The novel relaxes into itself when these settings are given the foreground, and perhaps there’s a parallel at work here when it…
Author and naturalist Janisse Ray advocates for wildness
…then. In Ecology, Ray describes her upbringing in South Georgia’s coastal plains, where she lived amid a vast junkyard collected by her hyper-religious father. She links her personal family history…
A writer returns to the Smoky Mountains and The Overstory
…hears: “Already this word is greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and fungi turning the logs to soil. Already, seedlings root in the nurse logs’ crevices,…
Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds links the stories of two women botanists
…never becomes artificial, never strains for connection. Rather, it provides the novel with endless thematic and metaphorical delights, and it serves to strengthen the ties between these two characters. For…
Poet Anna Laura Reeve entwines motherhood with the natural world in her luminous debut collection
…with startling honesty and insight, enmeshed with experiences of the natural world and the enduring drive to make art. The centerpiece of Reaching is a long poem, “The Edinburgh Postnatal…
What Things Cost offers a moving tribute to our nation’s working poor
…including those of immigrants, women, industrial workers, and agricultural laborers — in the foreground. Ruth Awad’s poem “My Father Dreams of a New Country” establishes this perspective, when the speaker…
