From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons-a half–blind bighorn ram, a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, solitude on the Green River. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human.
"What gives life and what remains after death are clearly legible in the arid lands of the desert Southwest. Craig Childs knows how to read the beauties and the grotesqueries of this landscape… Informed by science, indigenous legend, and many nights spent in a sleeping bag tossed down on wild ground, Childs' explorations are a tall drink of water in troubled times."
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING, author of Zoologies: On Animals & the Human Spirit
"Craig Childs takes us not only through the external landscapes of the huge and wondrous; he takes us into and through himself."
MARY SOJOURNER, author of The Talker and 29
"A desert koan, Childs' latest is still and restive, full of unresolved pairings and brilliantly so. His 1,000-watt prose is as alive as the heat that makes the Mojave tick."
ELIZABETH RUSH, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
