Bottomland is a collection of six longer sequences of poems: American Rough-leg; Bottomland; Catalogue of Utilities; A Pictorial History of Wilderness; Route to Cloudless: Day; and Mimesis, Synaptic. In this collection, Laressa Dickey sustains something of the spirit and space of the poem over a longer period of time, and explores the poem as an improvisational space. The poems were born in the deep chill of the Minnesota winter, and they begin out of her experience and memories of growing up on her family's tobacco farm in Tennessee, but move on to much more.