These are essays of place, locations where people have found themselves: a tree garden, a historic courthouse in New York's Revolutionary War corridor, an ancient volcano in central Arizona, a man's home given over to birds, Seneca's boyhood home in Ostia Antica, the shores of California's Salton Sea, Philadelphia's Wissahickon where Edgar Allan Poe spent idle hours drifting in a skiff. On Location, Essays of Place attempts to assemble the influences of location, and their necessity to human identity. Colored prints and illustrations.

From the Foreword by Tyler Meier: To my ear, Michael Gessner's oeuvre chimes distinctly and gorgeously with Merrillesque tones, but piqued with Auden's love of the clear-eyed. This is a collection interested in way-finding across a life's work; it is Keatsian in its capabilities, both of the negative sort and not. The range in what follows is some of the pleasure and basis for my associative comparisons and echoes; consider the great Parisian sequences from Transversales; the animal that gets at the animus in us all in Beast Book; the inclusiveness of the poems in Artificial Life, domestic,...

The orderly life of a Celtic studies professor is invaded by chaos; a 19 year-old trying to recover from a methamphetamine habit. Cassandra Collier has now entered her "settling down" period as her advisor puts it, at Braemer College where she and the professor, against all odds, find themselves in an emotional vortex of abandonment and destruction.