The greatest unsolved mystery of the American Southwest is the fate of the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the eleventh century converged on Chaco Canyon (in today's southwestern New Mexico) and built what has been called the Las Vegas of its day, a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments -- in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture, and in engineering -- were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America.

By the thirteenth century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it that brought about the rapid collapse of their civilization? Was it drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? For many years conflicting theories have abounded. Craig Childs draws on the latest scholarly research, as well as on a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the most forbidding landscapes of the American Southwest, to shed new light on this compelling mystery.

Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history, has developed a keen appreciation for these forbidding landscapes: their beauty, their wonder, and especially their paradoxes. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme.

Utterly memorable and fantastic...Certainly no reader will ever see the desert in the same way again. --Suzannah Lessard, Washington Post

Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.

Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in The Animal Dialogs focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom

2023 Southwest Books of the Year winner, 2023 Reading the West Nonfiction Award winner, Foreword INDIES Silver Award winner, and Colorado Book Award finalist

--CAMILLE T. DUNGY

In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs blends science and personal narrative to upend our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era, and reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Through it, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

Written in his trademark lyrical style, Craig Childs's riveting new book is a ghost story -- an intense, impassioned investigation into the nature of the past and the things we leave behind. We visit lonesome desert canyons and fancy Fifth Avenue art galleries, journey throughout the Americas, Asia, the past and the present. The result is a brilliant book about man and nature, remnants and memory, a dashing tale of crime and detection.

-Susie Harrington, meditation teacher, Desert Dharma

With Hush, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer once again turns her attention toward insights gleaned from daily life, trusting that everything we encounter, from evergreens and bluebonnets to snapdragons and an achy back after shoveling snow, has something to teach us about being human. Throughout each of these exquisite, open-hearted, often sensual poems, she brings us along as she finds a kind of renegade beauty wherever she looks. Let's go outside, she writes, and praise/the light till the light is gone, and then praise the dark, modeling for us just the kind of radical gratitude we need in our literature, and in our lives right now.

--James Crews, editor of Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

These are not quiet poems-they are forthright meditations on truth and courage, love and loss. They are life itself, revealed with compassion and grace. The poems in Hush speak like a healing meditation, a reminder of the beauty and sustenance in living with hearts and minds open.

-Susan J. Tweit, plant biologist and author of Walking Nature Home

In these quietly rendered poems, we are invited into the garden, and further into the wilderness-and find ourselves giving praise for that which is mud smudged and lumpy, for the sincerity of wild strawberries, and for the onslaught, which every gardener knows. Here Rosemerry shows us how one might endeavor to be the peace we want in the world. One comes away remembering that tending is at the heart of all healing. Because thorn bush. Because great blue heron. Because puddles.

-Wendy Videlock, author of Nevertheless

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poetry has appeared in O Magazine, TEDx, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her poems have been described as a deep oasis for all who seek to experience the sacred in every moment. Her most recent collection, Naked for Tea, was a finalist for the Able Muse Poetry Prize. Other recent books include Even Now, The Miracle Already Happening and The Less I Hold. She's included in the acclaimed anthology, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and leads mindfulness poetry discussion groups.

She served as San Miguel County's first poet laureate and as Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate (2019). Since 2006, she's written a poem a day. Favorite themes in her poems include parenting, gardening, the natural world, love, thriving/failure and daily life. She's performed and taught poetry for Think 360, Craig Hospital, Ah Haa School for the Arts, Weehawken Arts, Camp Coca Cola, meditation retreats (with Susie Harrington), 12-step recovery programs, hospice, Deepak Chopra, Shyft, and many other organizations.

She is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process (with Christie Aschwanden), co-host of the Talking Gourds Poetry Club (with Art Goodtimes), and co-leader of Secret Agents of Change (with Sherry Richert Belul). Though she earned an MA in English Language & Linguistics at UW-Madison, she still can't effectively pair socks.

Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.

Sumptuous and vivid in every instance. Childs writes with enviable concision and richness of depth in these miniature essays.
--THE UTAH REVIEW

Writer and adventurer Craig Childs dwells upon desert icons--human, animal, and otherwise--in these contemplative and visceral essays. From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons--a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

In Soul of Nowhere, Craig Childs answers the call of fierce places; the more desolate the landscape, the more passionately he is drawn to it. An intrepid adventurer, Childs tracks a broad territory: the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Mexico, the canyons of Utah, the White Mountain Apache Reservation, a deserted island in the Sea of Cortez. For Childs, these are the types of terrain that sharpen the senses, that demand a physicality the modern civilized world no longer requires. Discovering the artifacts of ancient peoples, he muses about the meaning and mystery of the lives they led. In his extraordinary nomadic treks, he finds the land animated and himself enlivened. Childs's obvious love for seemingly inhospitable places redeems them for armchair travelers and outdoor adventurers alike.

Are you prepared for a perilous journey into the wild?

This taut, intensely dramatic narrative immerses us in a labyrinth of canyons in the American Southwest where virtually nothing is alive -- barely any vegetation, few signs of wildlife, and scant traces of any human precursors -- and where we pay witness as two men confront not just immutable forces of nature but the limits of their own sanity. As a chronicle of adventure, as an emotionally charged human drama, as a confessional memoir, The Way Out is a transcendent book, a work destined to earn a lasting place in the literature of extremes.

A Place Called Home: Quilting a Life of Joy on the Colorado Plateau is a place-based creative non-fiction memoir at its heart. It is a collection of stories about how finding my place was essential to finding my happiness. It is a template for others to find their own happiness within natural and human communities, inspired by a love of a place that calls them home.

Janet Ross has a crucial story to tell about what it means to create not only a sense of place in the rural Southwest, but embody and foster an ethic of place. Through the metaphor of quilting, she shows how one creates a meaningful life by piecing together what appear to be disparate fabrics into a cohesive whole. Janet Ross's story belongs to the tradition of western women from Mary Austin to Maureen Whipple to Ellen Meloy. What this woman knows about independence and interdependence in the name of community and social change, we need to hear. - Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

A Place Called Home is a warm, cuddly quilt to wrap yourself inside of. It's also a rip-roaring account of remarkable life experiences. Hard to believe that one woman has managed to pack this many adventures into one life. From deep in the city to deep in the wilderness, Janet has woven all these experiences into a life of commitment to home on the Colorado Plateau and to the important role sense of place plays in finding happiness. - David Sobel, Professor Emeritus, Education Department, Antioch University New England and author of Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities

If our lives are patchwork quilts, how many panels represent home? Janet Ross spent her life seeking and finding her home place, loving and listening to the Colorado Plateau, creating outdoor experiences that taught countless diverse students how to appreciate, understand, and love the land. It's a life well lived, and Janet has sewn together a place-based memoir well worth reading. - Toby McLeod, Director, Sacred Land Film Project

I loved reading about Emma's Happiness Museum and Janet's descriptions made it come alive, as well as her pleasure in knowing an exceptional woman. The sustained metaphor of quilting really works; since I quilt it really spoke to me, and on other levels as well - growing up, family, her view of the world. This is a quality piece of work of which the author can be proud. - Ann Zwinger (in memoriam), author of Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah

As a metaphor and organizing principle, the quilt works well...Janet carries it throughout in a way that makes sense and holds the book together. - Ellen Meloy (in memoriam), author of The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky