"Gary Snyder joined his old friend, novelist Jim Harrison, to discuss their loves and lives and what has become of them throughout the years. Set amidst the natural beauty of the Santa Lucia Mountains, their conversations harnessing their ideas of all that is wild, sacred and intimate in this world move from the admission that Snyder's mother was a devout atheist to his personal accounts of his initiation into Zen Buddhist culture, being literally dangled by the ankles over a cliff. After years of living in Japan, Snyder returns to the States to build a farmhouse in the remote foothills of the Sierras, a homestead he calls Kitkitdizze. For all of the depth in these conversations, Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are humorous and friendly, and with the artfully interspersed dialogue from old friends and loves like Scott Slovic, Michael McClure, Jack Shoemaker, and Joanne Kyger, the discussion reaches a level of not only the personal, but the global, redefining our idea of the Beat Generatio

Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies. It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else.

"When Gary Snyder applied for the position of fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state in 1952 he wrote in his letter, "So I would like your highest, most remote, and most difficult-of-access lookout." He got the job and was sent to Crater Mountain Lookout, the most remote outpost in Washington. But this wasn't his first encounter with dangerous peaks." "This book, Snyder's first collection of new poems in twenty years, begins with poems about an earlier climb - Snyder's first ascent of Mount St. Helens in 1945. He learned of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the morning of his descent, from newspapers delivered to forestry offices on the slopes of the mountain. Climbing, mountain and backwoods encounters begun in those early years of his life set the tone and provided much of the substance for what has followed in the remarkable life of one of America's most revered poets." "Danger on Peaks contains work in a surprising variety of styles, creati