Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Bone Willows -- I. Taiga Paths -- Highbush -- No Snow, Yet -- Song of Forgetting -- Thicket -- Corner Shot -- The A-Frame in the Taiga -- The After-Party -- Sunrise -- "Now" Says the Clock -- Settling Dust -- Permafrost Sun Rot -- Aubade -- II. Trying The Names -- Left Hand, and Right -- Taking What's Offered -- Between Brigit and Ostara -- Parallax -- Collar and Leash -- What You Know About This Place -- Freya and Odr -- I Look for a Gate in the Barrier -- Before Aleph -- Before Completion -- Lost, Wandering -- Work of Nott -- The Other Dark -- III. All This Light -- Water and Smoke -- Boreal Halloween -- Tundra Carol -- The Nature of the Thing -- Patterns of Land and Drift -- If Only Night -- Transubstantiation -- Book of Revelations -- Aufeis -- Lupercalia -- Moving Up -- Preparing to Endure -- IV. Like Lichen -- Contra Dance -- Only Connect -- Faster, Spin the Wheel Faster -- August Morning -- In That Great Land, There Is No Fire Suppression -- North Is Only North -- The Preponderance of the Small -- Boreal Valentine -- A and Not-A -- Wintering in the Place -- Bernhard and Elise -- New House -- V. Sound of Breath -- Framing the Day -- Flight -- A Slip of Sun -- River's Head -- Spring Brings Only Early Dawn -- The Familiar Conditions Change Brings -- Day Reaches Pole to Pole -- In the Sky, the Mountains -- Chinook -- Orienteering -- VI. Brimstone and Soapstone -- Working the Claim -- Into Language -- Strength of the Signal -- Utopia, "A" Terminal -- Line of Sight -- Eden -- Tabletop Mountain -- Before the Rounding -- At Lessons -- Uncontrollable Journey -- Light Remains -- Shadowboxing the Shaman -- Biographical Note.
How to make sense of moving to, and living in, Alaska? In James Engelhardt's debut collection, these questions form the narrative and meditative frame for a landscape of domesticity and wilderness. Change comes quickly in the Far North, and transformation is the only constant.