In Into the Thicket, H. Palmer Hall, reminds us that an East Texas pine tree blown over by a storm simply clears the land for seedlings that follow, that the crunch of Gulf oyster shells under your boots beckons you back to the ocean, that sometimes you have to rub the bark of an oak tree to get under someone's skin. From the Neches to the Rio Grande to Tigris River, Hall's stories confirm the collective identity between man and woman and beast and soil, blurring time and space and life and death with his poetic pen.