The Alaska Pipeline becomes a line of poetry, a line in the land—the beginning of an epic and the end of an era. A map in the Antarctic becomes the ground beneath the reader’s feet, erasing itself with every step. A monk in a monastery beneath Mount Everest writes a prayer as the mountain traces a contrail across the upper atmosphere, inscribing a path to be followed.
In each place, William L. Fox reveals how the world leaves its mark on us—and how, through language, we move toward a sense of belonging. His spare, minimalist poems inhabit the planet’s wide empty spaces: Nevada’s Great Basin, the Antarctic and Arctic, the red deserts of interior Australia, the immense playas of Chile’s Atacama, and beyond. Between and within these lines, the poems explore how land becomes landscape, how terrain becomes territory, and how meaning is made.