The River You Touch, by Chris Dombrowski
When Dombrowski listens to a native storyteller, he’s transported by the sheer “elemental presence” of her words—they strike as viscerally as “pitched water running over a rock.” Readers of his almost preternaturally aware memoir/nature chronicle will feel a similar power in this poet’s own prose. He can see a moonlit salmon “on the pearl-colored gravel…lanky from territorial battles …tail shredded, misaligned kype jaw bulbous and scarred", or listen to a male meadowlark sing “a combination of notes that mimic the moving water’s unpredictability.” Being open to such experiences is the ideal life for this writer and fishing guide, his way of “becoming infused by the immensity” of Montana’s “infinitely wise landscape.” But even here, life is not ideal. Dombrowski worries about how he—and the planet—will afford his three children. But after a year teaching in Michigan, he returns to the mountains and a life that may be materially “threadbare,” but that allows him and his children the wisdom that comes only from knowing “places of deep resonant quietude.”