Introduction

What do we see when we look to the far corners? What do we see when we look back from those distant places? Let’s be honest, any map that has corners is a lie, a way of squaring the circle so that one can exile some ideas or identities and claim the center ground for oneself. When the map gets redrawn — and it always does — we see that every far corner is the center of someone else’s map, and the spot where we so confidently stand has wandered off to an edge. Here there be dragons.

This folio explores its own diverse geography, gazing back at us from the Norwegian island of Svalbard; from beneath the balete trees in the Philippines, where one finds cigar-smoking kapre, the tree-dwelling giants that take revenge when people cut down their homes; from an Ohio garden in winter, beneath a sky that is gray from edge to edge; and from the interior of a cell, where we catch a glimpse of the glowing, tumbling green that is life itself. What connects these pieces is the way they guide us out to the farthest corners of human experience and the writer’s imagination.