Staff Pick
Cascadia: the region that stretches from Southeast Alaska down to Northern California, and from the Pacific Ocean to parts of Idaho and Montana. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry is exactly as promised. Various writers and artists, spanning style and content, share their love of the Cascadia region through illustrations, poems, and natural history. Recommended By Corie K-B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook. I imagine walking through a forest and pausing to read these illuminating pages aloud to a listening cedar or a dipper. There are field guides that help us to see, and to name, and to know; Cascadia Field Guide does all of that and more. This is a guide to relationship, a gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into 13 bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more
Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more. All writers and artists have deep ties to the region.
This project was supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture
Review
“This beautiful choral celebration of entanglement ongoing and evermore is amazing, a wonder, a gratitude. Ross Gay, Author of Inciting Joy
Review
"The rich array of writers and artists in Cascadia Field Guide takes us by verse and image through one of the most diverse eco-regions in North America. The collection, inspired by ecological and cultural inclusion, catalogs beast by beast and habitat by habitat why so many look to the northwest corner of the nation for wild respite. More than a collection, it is an essential compendium to the Pacific Northwest; a 'feel guide' to an extraordinary place." J. Drew Lanham, Author of The Home Place and Sparrow Envy
Review
"This field guide is a deeply informative and wildly exuberant visual and literary romp through one of the most spectacular regions of the world — a varied chorus of voices and visual talents, all celebrating the animals and plants of the great Pacific Northwest." Ray Troll, Artist and Co-author of Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline
About the Author
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam and her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies. Fuhrman is the Director of Poetry for Western Colorado University's MFA in Creative Writing Program where she also teaches nature writing. She lives in West Central Idaho with her partner, Caleb, and their dogs, Carhartt and Cisco.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five books, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and elsewhere. A Stegner Fellow and Audre Lorde Prize winner, she is the founder of Broadsided Press, teaches at Brandeis University, and has worked as a naturalist in Cascadia and beyond for the past twenty-some years. Bradfield grew up in Tacoma and attended the University of Washington; she lives on Cape Cod.
Derek Sheffield grew up in the Willamette Valley and on the shores of the Salish Sea. He is the author of four books, including Not for Luck, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in High Country News, Poetry, and Orion. For the past 20 years, he has taught nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College. The poetry editor of Terrain.org, he lives with his family near Leavenworth, Washington.