A River Runs Through It: Essays on Water & Form

Rivers as historically and geographically disparate as the Colorado, Rappahannock, Orinoco, Caroní, Mississippi, Shenandoah, Tuolumne, Dart, Blyth, Río Chincha, Rio Grande, Cowlitz, Cahaba, Ohio, and St. Joseph flow through these essays—essays that turn to both the river and its absence (the arroyo) to consider form in writing: the sentence, the stanza, the poetic line, genre, metaphor, and more. These twenty-nine contemporary writers go down to the river to contemplate language and migration, Native and colonial names, childhood and age, queerness and rural landscapes, memory and elegy, environment and climate crisis. Flooding and meandering, the river carries and connects it all, as embodied and essential as language itself.