The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before… - Linda Hogan

(Your writing is rich with love and compassion – how do you stay rooted in those qualities when dealing with such tragic themes as the destruction of our environment and the treatment of Native Americans?) What other choice do I have? It doesn’t mean I have no anger about injustice. I do. I throw myself down when it is violent and painful. But it is also a matter of how to work against that injustice. I haven’t seen it succeed by fighting, yelling, rage, or outward anger. Think of those yelling faces you see on the news, mouths wide open. They lose. Their anger, their hatred has the opposite effect of what they are reaching toward.

The people, are watching Ama, studying her. She’s a curiosity. She is a human being of a different kind. She makes them doubt, I see that. (p134)

the evidence of healing is all around us. A scar, for instance, is evidence that a wound has healed. But the poems are also about wilderness; they're about animals that live in the wilderness and humans who go into the human wilderness, and who also fear the wilderness outside them. In some ways the poems are an investigation of the depths of people, the history of land.