Description:
The essays and poems collected in Crosscurrents North offer thoughtful meditations on the Alaska environment and the relationship between humans and nature. By distinguished writers such as John Haines, Nick Jans, Marjorie Kowalski Cole, Sherry Simpson, and Bill Sherwonit, these sixty-one compelling pieces celebrate the wildness and wonder of nature as well as the human impact on it. The writers tackle weighty topics such as the changing Alaska landscape and the impact of humans on its wild inhabitants, the effects of climate change, and the environmental side effects of architectural development, as well as tranquil meditations on the iconic bear and wolf or the plant world of berries, moss, and mushrooms. Jay Hammond, the former governor of Alaska, also contributes a foreword.
A clarion call for environmentalists and lovers of literature alike, Crosscurrents North challenges us to reconsider our relationship to the natural world.
Brief description: Marybeth Holleman was raised by North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains and lives in the embrace of Alaska's Chugach Mountains. She's the author of tender gravity: poems, The Heart of the Sound and coauthor of Among Wolves, and coeditor of Crosscurrents North, among others. She's also coeditor of the forthcoming A Poetic and Artistic Field Guide to Alaska. Her award-winning work appears in over fifty venues including Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, North American Review, Zoomorphic, and The Guardian. She has held artist residencies in such diverse places as Hedgebrook, Mesa Refuge, Ninfa, Denali National Park, and Tracy Arm Ford's Terror Wilderness. She transplanted to Alaska after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound just two years before the oil spill. When she's not kayaking those beloved fjords, she's following her wild huskies up and down Alaska's mountains.