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“Part storyteller, part nature guide, Mary Ardery forges a path through the back countries of pain and recovery ‘where the wilderness alone can’t reach.’ Nothing escapes her clear-eyed gaze. Not the ‘torn butterfly wing in an empty char tin.’ Not ‘beet-red hands cracked / with cold inside our gloves.’ Level Watch is a moving debut—generous, beautifully detailed, and wise.”
—Bruce Snider, author of Fruit
“These poems carry the beauty of the Blue Ridge wilderness and the heart-wrenching stories of women fighting their way back from addiction, pain, and loss. In poetry that feels like a conversation with a friend or a diary left open, Ardery’s honesty, vulnerability, and stunning craft guide readers like a compass, taking us to difficult places, leading us to trust her to lead us forward and back again. . . . Level Watch makes you realize that there are many different kinds of wilderness. We can lose ourselves in them. We depend on one another to find our way through, and on poetry as breathtaking and light-struck as a Blue Ridge morning.”
—Janice N. Harrington, author of Yard Show
“Are we lost? This question echoes through Mary Ardery’s powerfully crafted Level Watch. In this chronicle of life as a wilderness guide for women in a treatment program, Ardery examines the literal and figurative inundations that fall on people in recovery and those who care for them. In the woods, we find everything: ridgelines and robber barons, emergency and erudition, a reverberating family legacy of addiction, and the speaker’s own uneasy relationship to drinking and sobriety. Ardery writes these difficult subjects with clarity, depth, and care.”
—Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing