We Could Die Doing: Dispatches on Ageing from Oregon's Outback, is a compilation of short essays focused on topics related to ageing in poignant and humorous ways. Ellen Waterston's book seeks to reveal and discuss stereotypes about ageing as well as how to deal with ageing in today's youth-obsessed culture. As renowned poet Judith Barrington states, Most of us, whether of that 'certain age' or simply ap-proaching it, need to listen to her thoughts on the joyful possibilities of 'the third act'; she believes that 'this phase of life is as rich, complex and dynam-ic as any before it.' Waterston addresses a wide-ranging array of subjects including managing technology, green burial, politics during holiday events, social isolation, senior sex!, and a firm salute to enjoying the third act of life. All while circumnavigating the usual euphemisms used to describe ageing and its attendant issues. Waterston uses her own experience as a woman of a certain age, and highlighting the joyful possibilities, rather than the limitations of ageing. Waterston, a celebrated creative and gifted writer, currently serving a two-year term as Oregon Poet Laureate, is exceptionally qualified to offer both wisdom and data on the subject of ageing. She does not paint a rose-colored glow on her topic, but, as reviewer Andrea Carlisle stated, does not shrink back from the beauty, refreshment, and welcome challenge of it either.

In the opening poem of this generous, richly detailed collection, guests at a tropical hotel push their tables together after dinner and sit their stories side by side, until they blend into something better, the good eclipsing the bad. So it is with Hotel Domilocos as a whole. This book plunges us, first into fecund, semi-tropical Central America, then into harsh, high-desert Eastern Oregon, each place with its struggles for livelihood, its efforts at community, its straining toward connection of women and men. Both places feel deeply known. Over the rest of the book, she takes us to other places and to various periods of her life. She looks at what's right before her, what's around her, and what's brought her there. She looks, with great anxiety and with yearning for hope, to the welfare of Earth and the overall shape of her life. The intensity of her attention and the urgency of her desire to find or construct meaning are made palpable in the poems' thickly textured sound and sharply focused images. Their characters and landscapes enlarge our experience and impress themselves on our memory.

An anthology of the first five years of submissions from winners and finalists of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize. The book includes project descriptions submitted by each included writer, a writing sample and author biographies.