front cover of Canyon and Cosmos
Canyon and Cosmos
Searching for Human Identity in the Grand Canyon
Don Lago
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Throughout history, humans have sought creation stories to define our identity and affirm our connections with the universe, diverse life forms, and one another. Over the last two centuries, science has delivered a bold new creation story full of immense time and space, extraordinary objects, and powerful natural forces. Science ideas can seem mere abstractions, but at the Grand Canyon, better than anywhere else on Earth, our new creation story is manifested physically and powerfully.
 
A major work of literary nature writing, Canyon and Cosmos takes readers on a journey through the Grand Canyon's deep time, geological forces, and biological evolution, making them very real, personal, and meaningful. Through decades of hiking and kayaking, author Don Lago has gotten to know the canyon intimately. Ranging through world mythologies and Native American spirituality, he explores how humans have sought to understand the universe. He confronts existential questions of whether humans can find enough meaning in the scientific cosmos. Through poetic prose, symbolism, and philosophical insight, he shows how existence itself is our deepest source of life and meaning.  
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front cover of Grand & Arsenal
Grand & Arsenal
Kerri Webster
University of Iowa Press, 2012
From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster’s award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words. “This is how time sounds,” Webster writes; this is the hum and click of bodies “desirous of believing we’re all vehicle, every wet atom of us,” even as the saved seeds root in the fallen brickwork and the artifacts pile up: wisdom teeth, hummingbird skulls, plumb bobs, icons, antlers, incandescent bulbs.

Grand & Arsenal begins “Bless me I am not myself,” but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book’s defining struggle, enacted by a multitude of voices which move from rush to stumble and back again—meanwhile using all the tools we as a culture use to hold fear at arm’s length.

We hear a familiar irony, as in “On a trip West, porn in the hotel room. I can take or leave it. The climax that puts me in the seats? World’s end.” We hear humor, as in “I believed in . . . / . . . a certain apocalypse not so much foretold as crafted / by large-brained monkeys.” We hear understatement, as in “knowing it does not matter / in the grand—she would say scheme, I would say / mishap—.” Most importantly, though, these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.

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