PUBLISHED IN: 2022.
THE AUTHOR: Claudia Putnam.
THE EDITOR: Karen Craigo, Poetry Editor, Michael Czyzniejewski ,Editor-in-Chief. Thanks also to artist Nancy Martin of Glenwood Springs, CO, for the spectacular detail from her watercolor, New World IV (Nancy Martin – Cooper Corner Gallery) which graced the cover.
THE PUBLISHER: Moon City Press. Moon City Press (moon-city-press.com)
SUMMARY: The Land of Stone and River is a book of poetry exploring the gifts and horrors of being human in a world both at its apex (in this period of between the earth’s various traceable ends, anyway) and tipping at the brink of another major extinction event. People are small beings in a vast, ungraspable landscape of geography, time, and disaster—at the mercy of wind, tangled in history, caught in illness that can seem as inexorable as weather, tide, or geology. We persist. And the world with or without us.
THE BACK STORY & WHY THIS TITLE: I write fiction, memoir, and poetry, but poetry is always happening for me. No matter what I am trying to say, landscape is a critical force in my work. I found that several of my poems were beginning to refer to “the land of stone and river,” which originally meant the earth, or at least the Americas, before humans. Later it meant before white people. Finally it just began to symbolize, for me, a place, whether in the landscape or in the mind, where people were relatively small and caught by forces larger than their ken. Or were existing inside a vast context, such as deep time. More of my own time went by and I began to see that a lot of my work could be organized around sub-themes within this general idea.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This book appeals to readers who love wilderness/wildness, natural history, travel, and to those who struggle with or who care about those who struggle with mental illness–this interior rock/hard place context is the focus of the book’s final section.
REVIEW COMMENTS: Claudia Putnam’s extraordinary debut poetry collection, The Land of Stone and River, is a sustained engagement with the deep histories and wide vistas of the exterior and interior landscapes that are her subjects. The winner of the Moon City Poetry Award, the book brilliantly explores the lands of stone and river in the specific Western territories where she has lived or travelled, as well as the interior vistas of the mind and body. Ambitious poems across three sections travel through natural, historical, and mythological histories, often asking hard questions about our place in the natural world and its indifference to us. –Lynnell Edwards, Good River Review, author of The Bearable Slant of Light
“Claudia Putnam’s The Land of Stone and River is a terrain of wonder and terror—while it’s the mountainous surround of one person’s life, it’s also a region both godless and governed by many gods, where immense external and internal forces converge, where storms rise out of distances and depths that can never be fully explored. This collection of poems shows us our own hazardous miraculous world, and points, without any pointing-out, to the courage called-for to live in it.”
—Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time
In Putnam’s hands, nature is not that distant, separate entity to be gazed at from the walled off space of the library or drawing room. Nature is in us and around us and of us, and we are of it. From a woman catching a falling eagle and holding it through its death to another woman believing elk are rearing her aborted daughter, The Land of Stone and River is an astonishing, bright presence, that simultaneous slap of wind and burst of sun that affirms ‘No break /really heals’ even as it bestows ‘peace on all who mourn.’”
—Melissa Studdard, author of I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and Dear Selection Committe
AUTHOR PROFILE: Claudia Putnam spent most of her adult life on the Colorado Plateau and lives now on a tiny island in a remote area of the Puget Sound. Her adult son lives in Seattle; she wanted to be closer, without interfering too much. She misses snow, as do her huskies, but enjoys kayaking and learning about the rainforest. She’s relieved to be less threatened by wildfires but now worries about a gigantic earthquake.
Claudia’s shorter pieces appear in dozens of literary journals. The Land of Stone and River is her first full-length collection. A chapbook, Wild Thing in Our Known World, appeared in 2012 and is pretty hard to find now. Her brief memoir, Double Negative, won the Split/Lip Press creative nonfiction chapbook prize and came out in 2022. It was reviewed widely. A novella, Seconds, was published in 2023 by Neutral Zones Press. She is finishing two poetry collections, a novel, and a short story collection. Look for a story appearing soon in Sequestrum Literary Review.
Double Negative: Putnam, Claudia: 9781952897238: Amazon.com: Books
Seconds: Claudia Putnam: 9798218158880: Amazon.com: Books
Claudia is grateful for the support of several organizations, which have provided residency fellowships, including the year-long George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I really wanted to connect readers to the greater-than-mundane world—whether that’s animals, the pre-human context of our existence, geology, other cultures, social justice (again, think small humans in a vast web of forces), ecology. I didn’t want to preach, just put readers into these landscapes or dilemmas or experiences.
SAMPLE: Two shorter poems:
Lynx
I saw you floating through snow
light as the sbnowsh oe hare.\
light as the snowshoe hare
who in terror leapt before you.
I miss that snow and the winds
it came in on. The work it made:
hungering woodstove,
driveway shoveling, daily ski
from my door to your mountain.
Storm blue of the spruce.
They said you were extinct then,
not yet reintroduced.
I saw you; you looked straight at me.
Remanence
After something, someone—which is an animal?
—dies, life remains, palpable. Wakes
are held until that feeling fades. Call it
remanence, we are electromagnetic
beings, animated just as Shelley
knew, drawing lightning to us
like a sister. Remanence, place
your hands, if you are not fearful,
upon the neck. The hip,
feel molecules racing in their
confusion. Animated, specialized,
gene-coded in search of tribe.
Feel the astonishment, an entire system
atomized, each atom still alive.
Sit beside the body. It might
be frightful, because we have forgotten.
Find the tingle, the race of life
still there. It’s not spooky except
if you are spooked by its enormity.
All you have to do is ask. If it
wants to find its way, it will. Whisper,
Come.
Other poems from the book, published individually previously, are linked on my website’s ‘work” page: WORK | Claudia Putnam. Newer pieces can be found here as well.
WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon and Bookshop.org have for some reason never carried this book, though they do have my other longer works. It’s best ordered from Moon City’s sister press: The Land of Stone and River | University of Arkansas Press (uapress.com). If you’d like to ask your local bookstore to get it, they can scroll down to the far lower right of the Univ of Ark page and call the number there to contact the Chicago Distribution Center, for bookstore pricing. Same for libraries, if you want to encourage your library to carry it.
I have a limited number of signed copies available (see below for contact info).
PRICE: The University of Arkansas Press currently has it on sale for $9.95, which is probably the best price available. List price is $14.95.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Reach me at cputnam (at) indra (dot) com. Website: https://claudiaputnam.com
Twitter: @ClaudiaPutnam BlueSky: @ClaudiaPutnam.bsky.social (I will be changing this to @ClaudiaPutnam.co, but there are a few steps).
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 