BOOKS
Available 3/15/25
This is more than a personal narrative; it is a powerful call for environmental awareness, the feminine, understanding of history, and a celebration of beauty. With unflinching honesty, CMarie Fuhrman examines the complexities of history, the sacredness of the land, and the urgent need to protect our wild spaces. These essays resonate with a deep reverence for Indigenous people, history, and the natural world. They will speak to anyone who has found refuge in nature, wrestled with the past, or dared to envision a brighter tomorrow.
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Here comes a long-anticipated book from a major voice in the American West. "Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return" is an intimate and generous text, beautifully written in dense, rich prose, a paean of discovery and loss on the South Fork of Idaho's Salmon River. A growing Indigenous curiosity permeates these pages, that ancient view of seeing all nature as alive and kin. And there is tension: CMarie Fuhrman shows up in the wild sometimes as Crazy Horse, at other times, Columbus--seeking metaphor and story, tangled initially in fear that often dissolves in love. The richness of wild nature, dogs, family and community are all celebrated. This is a wonderful book.
-Doug Peacock, author of The Grizzly Years, Was it Worth It, Walking it Off
Gorgeous, gut-wrenching, and transcendent. CMarie Fuhrman offers the reader both her arrant honesty and her giant heart. Salmon Weather casts a love spell.
--Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West and True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America.
Co-edited with Elizabeth Bradfield & Derek Sheffield Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide. ​This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Cassia Crossbill), offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
In this groundbreaking anthology of Indigenous poetry and prose, Native poems, stories, and essays are informed with a knowledge of both what has been lost and what is being restored. It presents a diverse collection of stories told by Indigenous writers about themselves, their histories, and their present; a celebration of culture and the possibilities of language, in conversation with those poets and storytellers who have paved the way. A truly synergetic collection of contemporary and early Native voices. Featuring forty-four poets, including Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, and Orlando White; original influence essays by Diane Glancy on Lorca, Chrystos on Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich on Elizabeth Bishop, LeAnne Howe on W. D. Snodgrass, Allison Hedge Coke on Delmore Schwartz, Suzanne Rancourt on Ai, and M. L. Smoker on Richard Hugo, among others; and, a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists.
The poems in Fuhrman's book are a kind of siphoning of language which results in a fusion of earth, animal, human--a one-ness, beautiful, and also damned. As a poet who hikes and lives in a landscape still wild, she brings us the wild and the broken. The double meaning of the title shows the reader her intent--to both pierce and bond with her words. The first five poems describe both the beauty and mutilation of the beings of water--salmon. "Neither one of us had our second names..." Here is the linkage between the damming of the reservoir and the loss of land--home--death for the persona of the speaker, a native woman. The body of the world, of fish, and of women is shown through exquisite language and a blending of the senses: "her eyes straining to hear..." Then the tonal shift in "The Problem of My Body"--"scars of your scalpels and your slurs"--replicates the damn you implicated throughout these poems. Fuhrman has ordered her book in a spiral, a circling, a nurturing word and world we are meant to read.