New Releases by Terry Tempest Williams

"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation. In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.

Debra Bloomfield''s hypnotic photographs provide a visual map of the powerful interplay between sea and sky. Over theyears, on a single lonesome stretch of beach, Bloomfield has captured an undeniably intimate portrait of the ocean at rest. Almost impressionistic in their tone, this collection of 60 photographs chronicling seascapes smudging into a series of hazy horizons creates a striking contrast with what we''ve come to expect of ocean photography. Still is a captivating and entrancing vision by a unique voice in contemporary photography.

A stunning dialogue between two daughters of the Colorado Plateau; an exquisite rendering of the red rock canyons of southern Utah and the natural history that evokes a poetry of place

The author talks about wilderness and wildlife, place and eroticism, art and literature, democracy and politics, family and heritage, Mormonism and religion, writing and creativity, and other subjects in a set of interviews gathered and introduced by Michael Austin to represent the span of her career as a naturalist, author, and activist.

In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Williams makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah. As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams, the beloved author of Refuge, is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. Here she writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.

Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for more than twenty years. His growing body of work bears witness to how humankind has visibly scarred and continues to alter the earth''s surface. This book, published in conjunction with the first major touring exhibition of Gowin''s photographs in over ten years, focuses on images created after 1986.

Terrorism. Homeland Security. Patriotism. Since September 11, 2001, these terms have emerged as a fundamental part of our cultural lexicon, with their unsaid assumptions and attendant emotions being used to inspire and buttress a varied set of cultural, political, and military responses to the events of that day. What is terrorism? What is a secure homeland? Who is a patriot?

Beautifully illuminated with drawings and paintings by noted artist Mary Frank, Williams, one of the West''s most intense and lyrical writers, invokes the lure and drama of the landscape. This is an incandescent meditation--in word and image--on the physical vastness and beauty of the desert and the spiritual place one woman finds for herself there.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry''s mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.

A COLLECTION OF STORIES READ BY THE AUTHOR.

"These things are real: desert, rocks, shelter, legend" (Judith Fryer). Coyote''s Canyon evokes the beauty and mystery of southern Utah''s desert canyons--home to Navajo and to the Anasazi who came before, and spiritual homeland to the Coyote Clan, thousands of individuals who draw nourishment from this land. This collaboration between photographer John Telford and writer Terry Tempest Williams is an intimate meditation on one of the earth''s most extraordinary landscapes. Telford''s spectacular color photographs of the region''s canyons, mesas, hidden waterways, arches, Anasazi cliff dwellings, and desert vistas are rich with the reflected ligh that elevates rock into sculpture. Tempest Williams'' stories celebrate the legend and ritual surrounding this sacred place, creating a compelling new mythology for desert lovers--persons quietly subversive in the name of the land. Taken together, these photographs and words are an invitation, an initiation into the desert''s sanctuary of secrets--Coyote''s Canyon. photographs throughout

A simple introduction to the plant and animal life that flourishes in a marsh.

Examines over a dozen different types of snow and snowy conditions through the vocabulary of the Inuit people of Alaska. Discusses the physical properties and formation of the snow and how it affects the plants, animals, and people of the Arctic.