Cameron Scott

Whether an upstream edge or a downstream edge, the world of watersheds in Michael Garrigan’s newest book of poetry, River, Amen, are many: flooded, failed, left high and dry in drought, pastoral banks in afternoon sun. And it is from these living edges River, Amen, begins to take shape. In one of the first poems of the collection, “Of Blood and Bark,...

Appalachian landscape; Appalachian culture and lives. There is a vastly rich intersection between the two in Todd Davis’s new collection of poems coffin honey, Michigan State University Press, 2022. Not as much a righting of a world gone awry, as a kind of witnessing or coming-to-rites of the world as is, each poem in the collection drips in both death...

On one of the last lukewarm days of fall, on the tail end of the hottest summer on record, I took my mother-in-law fly-fishing. Barring two short mornings, one when a friend was visiting, and another to meet a fellow teacher on the river before school began, I had left the local river alone. I did not like how low and hot, how algae-filled, how few steps I...

If Oregon’s anadromous fish were a multi-billion-dollar corporation headed by a savvy and top-notch team of money-making Coho-king-and-queen-and-them-pins, unafraid of steely-eyed bottom lines, hard-set at keeping the resource and ecosystems thriving… If Oregon’s anadromous fish influenced local, state, national, and international politics with...

There are rivers in my life, so many rivers. Systems and cycles fed by snowmelt and bug hatches, leaf fall and deep freeze. So many rivers. I guide these rivers and fish these rivers and wander along these rivers and sleep beside these rivers. Rivers that run gold or red or nearly black at dusk. Rivers that run clear or jade green or pea green or soil...