In Frank Stewart's fourth book, poetry has become fundamentally an act of association and correspondence with others, and art is understood as a form of empathy that overcomes history, time, nation and language. Poet Nick Bozanic observes that these are the "deliberate motions of a sensibility seeking not to reveal itself, but to rediscover and renew something precious on the very lip of loss." Sensuously arresting and shot through with a soft, sweet aching, these "lapidary lines move with the skill, finesse, and acuity of a master" —Arthur Sze.

A Natural History of Nature Writing is a penetrating overview of the origins and development of a uniquely American literature. Essayist and poet Frank Stewart describes in rich and compelling prose the lives and works of the most prominent American nature writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including:

•Henry D. Thoreau, the father of American nature writing.

•John Burroughs, a schoolteacher and failed businessman who found his calling as a writer and elevated the nature essay to a loved and respected literary form.

•John Muir, founder of Sierra Club, who celebrated the wilderness of the Far West as few before him had.

•Aldo Leopold, a Forest Service employee and scholar who extended our moral responsibility to include all animals and plants.

•Rachel Carson, a scientist who raised the consciousness of the nation by revealing the catastrophic effects of human intervention on the Earth's living systems.

•Edward Abbey, an outspoken activist who charted the boundaries of ecological responsibility and pushed these boundaries to political extremes.

Stewart highlights the controversies ignited by the powerful and eloquent prose of these and other writers with their expansive—and often strongly political—points of view. Combining a deeply-felt sense of wonder at the beauty surrounding us with a rare ability to capture and explain the meaning of that beauty, nature writers have had a profound effect on American culture and politics. A Natural History of Nature Writing is an insightful examination of an important body of American literature.

The title, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, alludes to an Iroquois story of healing. Atatarho, the Onondaga leader, had a crooked body and a head covered with snakes. In order to achieve peace, Atatarho had to be healed: his mind straightened, his body straightened, the snakes combed from his hair. Similarly, during the writing of these poems, Stevens experienced a healing, a setting straight of his life and a setting straight of the record.

The collection, written between 1993 and 1999, is comprised of five sections. The opening section, written as a way to explore new natural surroundings, is accompanied by the author's drawings of prairie flora. The second section is a series of love poems. The third section examines the relationship between European music and Native American music and observes that both should be viewed equally as expressive of each culture. And the fourth section consists of short poems—translations, if you will—of Iroquois stories and songs. The final section consists of a long poem studying the effects of colonization coupled with an emotional contemplation of nature and one's place within it. It is concerned with language—who controls it, who possesses it, and how it is used by the colonizer to erase indigenous cultures.

This collection by Mohawk poet, James Thomas Stevens explores the effects of colonization on either side of the Bering Strait—China and North America. Three long poems focus on mapping, post-colonial emergencies and propaganda, while the short poems are personal experiences in China and Native America. Includes "dis(Orient)," "The Mutual Life," and "Alphabets of Letters."

This darkly comic novel chronicles the life of Nicholas Dee, an earnest young historian whose crippling fear of loss has become his undoing. Lulled to sleep at night by the city's constant clatter of police choppers, Nicholas parlays his fear of losing everything into a promising idea for an academic grant: He will write a "History of Insurance." In this glittering, unidentified city of high culture and hideous crime, Nicholas can find no safe haven for the orderly life he desires. At night he is haunted by memories of his dead father; by day the devilish machinations of the university and the police ensnare him. His book, already evolving from a history of insurance into a compelling narrative tale (chronicling the creation of an opera house in seventeenth-century Holland), becomes his only refuge.

This stunningly crafted novel takes place in the years of a boy's passage to manhood in the shimmering, vibrant San Francisco of 1914. The son of a suffragette mother and eccentric ornithologist father, Maxwell Field Kosegarten keeps a poignant record of discovery and loss in the diary his mother gives him for his sixteenth birthday. Even as he and his half-Persian friend, Duncan, explore the ruins left behind by the 1906 earthquake, the gala World's Fair, and the erotic, soul-shaking feelings of first love, the romantic glow of this interlude between boyhood and maturity is tarnished first by accounts of the carnage in France and then by the swift, tragic ending of Max and Duncan's love affair. As memory and reality entwine, as ideas mutate through introspection, and as feelings sturggle for life on paper, Landscape: Memory becomes a lyrical, beautifully written narrative—an impressive debut for a gifted young writer.

On one hand Murder Ballad is a fierce critique of Jane Springer's Southern inheritance, on the other these poems quickly reveal the enigmatic beauty and sharply ironic humor contained in the still-relevant colloquialisms that often shape her characters. Her loose definitions of Southern-isms are the jumping-off place for the masterful poet as she leaps, narrates, and redefines the American South.

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. Dear Blackbird, is the 2006 prize-winning volume selected by this year's judge, J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review.

 "Most new poetry I read nowadays seems decorous in its austerities or its embellishments: willed, over-plotted, dry. Not Jane Springer’s. Her work leaps to its tasks with a heady extravagance. Dear Blackbird, is her letter to the world, as eerie as Dickinson’s. Its pages don’t depend on a sequence of neat stanzas but are a surge of incantatory phrases and feelings. The skin of each poem quivers with the mind’s contradictions, the heart’s panic. It is risky, not merely reckless; rapturous, not merely rapacious. Memories spill over fantasies, Southern lore collides with hipster know-how. This book is the most exciting debut in years, and when we remember that 'début' originally meant to score first in a new game, that is just what Springer has done: taken on a new set of terms and struck first, struck gold." —J. D. McClatchy

In her fourth collection of poems Elizabeth Spires addresses the elemental subjects of life and of literature: birth, death, creation, and intimations of immortality. The first section focuses on the experiences of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth from the points of view of both mother and child. The second section offers a reversal and reply in which the poems move out into a divided and divisive world. These poems are distinguished by an immaculate lyricism, a pristine sense for the natural world and the rhythms of language.

In Elizabeth Spires's sixth collection of poetry, the pilgrim soul, in its various guises, meditates on its own slow becoming, finding humble companions in creatures as unlikely as a lowly snail, a prehistoric coelacanth, or a tiny Japanese netsuke of a badger disguised as a monk. For Spires, life is both a pilgrimage and a deepening—birth, death, and transformation all part of a seamless continuum. Possessed of a calm, crystalline sense of eternity, her poems invite fellow travelers to sit for a little while and be cleansed of the dust of existence.