Winner of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada General Audience awardWe live at the bottom of an ocean of air – 5,200 million million tons, to be exact. It sounds like a lot, but Earth's atmosphere is smeared onto its surface in an alarmingly thin layer. Shrink the earth to the size of a basketball and our atmosphere would be as thick as a layer of food wrap – 99 percent contained within 18 miles. Yet within this fragile margin lies a magnificent realm –...

A Governor General’s Award – nominated poetry collection from a prize-winning poet and essayist. Christopher Dewdney uses the vocabulary of paleontology, biology, and physics in poems that meditate on life in southwestern Ontario.

Christopher Dewdney’s love for the landscape and the flora and fauna of southwestern Ontario has provoked some of the most gorgeously erotic prose ever to appear in this country. From that love, augmented by ardent research in the field, emerges a marvellously compelling, futuristic vision of time and space collapsed into near-simultaneity. Books IV and V of The Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, presented in Signal Fires, are self-contained sections of a continuing prose po...

A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney’s poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates...

Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical, intimate tone, and a...

We prepare for it each evening, and spend half our lives in its embrace, yet night retains its mysteries. In ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT, author and poet Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm.Twelve chapters correspond to the twelve hours of an 'ideal' night, starting at 6pm and ending at 6am, and serve as points of departure for night's central themes; from sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, ...

At the center of Franco Ferrucci's God: An Autobiography is one tender, troubled character: God. In the beginning is God's solitude, and because God is lonely he creates the world. He falls in love with Earth, plunges into the oceans, lives as plant and reptile and bird. His every thought and mood serve to populate the planet, with consequences that run away from him—sometimes delightfully, sometimes unfortunately. Witty, thought-provoking, and beautifully translated, this playful...

"Beautifully written essays" on animals, "the real and mythological, the ordinary and the exotic, the wild and the domesticated" ( Publishers Weekly).Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world—both as physical beings and spiritual symbols—and not returning.In this collection of linked essays, Alison Ha...

An ant to the starsor stars to the ant—which ismore irrelevant?Weekend Jet Skiers—rude to call them idiots,yes, but facts are facts.Clamor of seabirdsas the sun falls—I look upand ten years have passed."—from "Dawn Notebook"Such is the expansive terrain of Seven Notebooks: the world as it is seen, known, imagined, and dreamed; our lives as they are felt, thought, desired, and lived. Written in forms that rang...

One of America's great nature-writers explores the magic and science of feathers.**“An illuminating study of an evolutionary marvel.” ―**EconomistWinner of the John Burroughs MedalFeathers are an evolutionary marvel: aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. From flying dinosaurs to showgirls on the Las Vegas Strip, their story spans hundreds of millions of years—yet has never been fully told. In Feathers

A revered ecologist and conservationist examines the origins and possible futures of humankind within the context of the Space Age, masterfully “[communicating] the awesome spectacle of our environmental crisis” (New York Times Book Review)To read Loren Eiseley is to renew a sense of wonder at the miracles and paradoxes of evolution and the ever-changing diversity of life. In this brilliant collection, he considers the cosmological significance and ultimat...

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a t...