Don’t be fooled. Mapping water by Timothy Pilgrim will
lure you in with idyllic days of drink, fly fishing and road
trips throughout the Pacific Northwest—oft in homage to poets
Richard Hugo, James Welch and Nelson Bentley. In fact,
shooting whiskey in their Dixon, Montana, watering hole,
leaves Pilgrim “slurring my poets.”

Pilgrim is sly, crafting verse with a light hand as he builds
a pressured narrative that blindsides like an avalanche and
leaves you “breathing snow.” Throughout this collection,
hope pulses, alert for the penetration of the searchers’ metal
probes: “If tempted to sleep, imagine a new lover finds you,
scoops a place by your side, lies close.”

Mapping water is an accounting of such embraces, final,
futile, sometimes fulfilled, always urging hope: “We still have
enough time to cast about for a new spring.”
—Sandra Kleven, editor, Cirque: A Literary Journal
for the North Pacific Rim