Abstract
This collection of poems and personal essays deals with ecology, gender roles, and the function of narratives in the current era of climate crisis. Within it, the speaker considers her relationship to place, ecosystems, family, sexuality, and self. Section I establishes expectations and broad questions as the speaker finds beauty in a farmland river and investigates her family’s historical participation in colonizing Idaho and Washington. Section II dives deeper into the body’s ties to landscape as the speaker confronts physical danger, mortality, and the limitations of language; meta-writing engages with nature writing lineage and metaphor, while narrative essays and a long poem trace the speaker’s embodied and gendered interactions with precarious environments. Section III takes an expansive view of storytelling as it attempts to answer the question of what it means to love a place in times of death and grief, leaning on metaphor and mythology to understand wildfire emotions and what it means to live fully in one’s body. The collection finds itself at the confluence of twenty-first century nature writing and somatic writing as it pulls apart the complexities of living through colonial and climate disaster. It also offers hope for continuance through its ecological observations and deeply considered connections to landscapes in the North American West.