Desert quartet Book

"No compass can orient me here, only a pledge to love and walk the terrifying distances before me." So begins Terry Tempest Williams as she invokes the lure and drama of the Colorado Plateau. Her experience is related with the emotional depth and in the brilliantly lyrical language we have come to expect from her. Williams's journey into the canyons of Southern Utah reveals an erotics of place. With the four elements - Earth, Water, Fire, and Air - as metaphoric pathways to understanding, she dares to explore what it might mean to make love to the land. Williams comes to see how the desert exposes, stretches, and inspires us. There is no separation between our bodies and the body of the Earth.

Beautifully illuminated with drawings and paintings by noted artist Mary Frank, Williams, one of the West's most intense and lyrical writers, invokes the lure and drama of the landscape. This is an incandescent meditation--in word and image--on the physical vastness and beauty of the desert and the spiritual place one woman finds for herself there.