Torrey House Press

Amy Irvine's response to Desert Solitaire — a woman's reckoning with Abbey's legacy, the modern West, and what it means to love a landscape that's being loved to death. Sharp, personal, and willing to take on the old man.

The history of the Animas River watershed in southwestern Colorado — from Ancestral Puebloans to the Gold King Mine spill. A river poisoned by mining and a community reckoning with the consequences.

“I have just stapled my hair to the roof,” begins Seasons, a glimmer of the wry wit to come in this posthumous collection of writing from the late Ellen Meloy. Originally recorded as audio stories for NPR Utah in the 1990s, these essays evoke the Colorado Plateau and Southwest canyon country Meloy called home and muse. As with her Pulitzer-shortlisted The Anthropology of Turquoise and Eating Stone, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Meloy is funny and insightful as she links humans and nature in surprising ways. From the profound beauty of Navajo culture milling about the post office to the admirable anarchy of little old ladies in Buicks, not much escaped Meloy’s observant eye for sifting connections out of the finest grains of redrock dust. Annie Proulx’s foreword and Meloy’s own illustrations help anchor this feather of a book, a slight 94 pages, into a vessel steadfast and endearing.

Childs in the desert again — virga that never reaches the ground, bones that last for centuries, and the dry places where life is most concentrated and most fragile.