Summary

A lyrical essay collection exploring reconciliation, colonial legacies, and climate
change in the Raven Biome of the Alaska-Yukon borderlands through research,
personal reflection, and ekphrastic meditations on maps and artifacts; Corinna Cook
wrestles with difficult pasts while facing an uncertain ecological future.

Contents

The Photographer (a prelude)

Part One

The Slower Questions

The Black Spruce

Distance Over Light

Sister Essays: The Young and the Old

The Young

The Old

Swan Signs

Part Two

The Story of the Day

Atlin

Permafrost Is an Archive

YFN 101: What We Give to One Another

Chooutla: Truth and Reconciliation

Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades

Part Three

The Trails are Always There

Under the Bridge at Johnson’s Crossing

The Kohklux Map

The Ash and the Literature: A Diptych

A Triangle of Sun

Salsa

The End

Acknowledgments

Notes

Author

Corinna Cook is the author of the essay collection Leavetakings. Her writing has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Terrain.org, and Pedagogy and American Literary Studies. Cook, a former Fulbright Fellow and an Alaska Literary Award recipient, is a graduate of Pomona College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks and holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. She serves as core nonfiction faculty at Alaska Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing and lives in Douglas, Alaska.

Reviews

“This volume is a spiritual cartography, a deep map of aching, of longing. Cook’s essays chart our small human awareness as one part of geologic time, taking in spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical ways of knowing, from archives and from culture-bearers from many largely oral traditions.”

—Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn and former poet laureate of Alaska

“These well-crafted essays become forms of reconciliation storytelling. Cook asserts that a shared future requires everyone to enter into right relationships with divisive histories, to pitch in to help carry the difficult past (and present).” 

—Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn and former poet laureate of Alaska

“This book follows a lineage of Alaska writers reckoning with belonging to a vast and wild place but Cook forges new ground in her unique combination of rigorous scholarship and thinking, her wry original voice, and her poetic leaps and stunning imagery.”

—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Living with Wolves and Breath on a Coal