In his second collection, Walker Abel continues to voice the archetypal and contemplative presences awaiting us within the natural world. These are poems of surprise, poems of revelation. Not quite fairy tale, not quite magical realism, the poems are stories out of the unconscious, which is to say, out of the wild. For Abel, the poem is a threshold. It leads into another realm that is both the familiar grounded world of mountains and rivers, and also an ineffable world, where we meet our own yearnings for open-hearted encounter with the fullness and mystery of earthy life.