Crosscut

Sean Prentiss is an associate professor of English at Norwich University. He is the author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (UNM Press) and the coauthor of Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. He lives with his family on a small lake in northern Vermont.

Prentiss's poetic debut, Crosscut, tells the story of a ragtag trail crew crisscrossing the Northwest, learning the woods and themselves. By the end you, too, will pine for aching shoulders, dips in the river, and a night under the stars." — Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die: A Novel"Prentiss's poems have the muscular strength of a Pulaski swing - contact with earth and stone and wood, carving a trail in the wilderness away from all that hurts us, telling the tale of a crew of teenagers - so recently lost." — Todd Davis, author of Native Species and Winterkill"The world is strewn with nature poems, but too few of them feature blisters and sweat, as Sean Prentiss's do. My favorite poems here center the tools integral to life on a trail crew - chainsaws cut through bullshit, mattocks churn up new ground. Reader, open yourself to diction as incantation: Pulaski, hitch, crosscut. Sapwood, rakers, snag." — Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods