Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery’s visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.

I could see ridgelines and drainage valleys,
blue pockets of lakes and bald gray rock faces 

scattered throughout the forest. From there
the wilderness looked manageable. From there 

it all seemed worth it. What do you think? you asked, 
turning to me, your silver nose ring catching sun. 

Up that high, there was no leaf canopy to shield us. 
I knew the odds you’d stay clean. Still, I had hope.

I said, I think I finally understand maps,
and you smiled, knew exactly what I meant.