Memory s deposit is my only asset now, says the narrator of Miles Wilson s wrenching poetry collection. These are fiercely honest poems about how a man s life can meander through pain and indiscretion, anger and bitterness; how it can express itself in rage and pungent wit and find a kind of healing in the natural world of mountains and trout streams. Wilson s meditations range from the perils of a firefighter s life in the forests of the West to the domestic agonies of a marriage gone wrong, to the resonances between wild nature and the flawed human spirit, and to the wisdom found in the...

"Fire Season" is set on a US Forest Service firefighting crew stationed in Southern California and working throughout the West in the mid-1960's. A significant presence in the West, the US Forest Service is little treated in fiction. Many readers have no exposure to the role of the Forest Service in firefighting beyond some gauzy notion of smokejumpers, lookouts, and Smokey the Bear. Yet since WW II, tens of thousands of seasonal firefighters have been the primary line of defense against forest fires of increasing ecological, economic, and human cost. "Fire Season" focuses on the paradigm for...

These stories from four decades are grounded in the geographical, cultural, and psychological American West. Ranging from realism to fables, from childhood to senescence, from a faltering rancher to the rich and rocky road of fatherhood, Woodswork is filled with indelible characters keenly rendered. This is not fast-food fiction but a nourishing feast.