Overview

Set in an Alaskan fish camp, these vividly drawn poems show the beauty of family amid seascape changes wrought by the climate crisis. In this splendid collection, Vivian Faith Prescott introduces the storyteller Salmon Woman who weaves scenes of sea and community in poems that bring the journey of salmon-and salmon people-to life. Salmon and people are intimately connected on this remote island where all beings face the ravages of change and the unexpected relationships that bind them together.

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Reviews

""The Divination of Salmon captures the urgency and precarious beauty of interconnected migrations and cycles of labor. Images glint and refract like fish scales."" --LAURA DA', Tributaries ""These poems are dynamic and will survive eruptions, landslides, and wildfires. They will indeed stand the test of time."" --CHARLOTTE GLOVER and DAVE KIFFER, Parnassus Books and Gifts ""I was moved by the provocations in this book, by the earned and sacred sincerity it evinces. The Divination of Salmon is a work of witness and wonder, naming both the vanishing and the enduring. Prescott has written a book that listens as much as it speaks, carrying memory, ecology, and myth with equal clarity. These poems do not simply describe a world; they inhabit it, give it back to us alive, urgent, shimmering. This book is news."" --ALBERTO RÍOS, Every Sound is Not a Wolf ""In Prescott's poetry, the majestic salmon embodies an ethos of strength and connection in rural Alaska and offers nourishment amid the spiritual and environmental struggles of our times."" --TEOW LIM GOH, Bitter Creek ""Prescott as teacher and wise woman speaker, lyrical environmental justice advocate and reminder of our profound connections to the planet. These salmon poems reveal entrails and glisten in the moonlight. They jump and ripple directly into your soul."" --ANA CASTILLO, My Book of the Dead ""Poems that evokes a symbiotic dance between salmon and woman and for each, a pebble is placed upon the shaman's drum."" --GARY V. ANDERSON, SKYFIXER ""Grounded deeply in Southeast Alaska, salmon, and a way of life that is inextricable from them both, The Divination of Salmon is poignant, timely, evocative, and works to keep salmon swimming up our rivers for generations to come."" --MARY CATHERINE MARTIN, Communications Director at SalmonState ""Prescott's poems burst with the grit and muck of living off the sea, carrying us with them as they switch and twist like fish on a line, soaring to moments of wonder. There is grief here, there is joy, there is wit and heart and history."" --GERRI BRIGHTWELL, Turnback Ridge

Author Information

Vivian Faith Prescott (she/her) is a bi writer, born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak'w, in Southeast Alaska. Her children and grandchildren are Ravens and belong to the T'akdeintaan clan from GlacierBay. She was adopted into that clan and is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi. Prescott is the author of thirteen books and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a MA in Cross Cultural Studies: Indigenous Knowledge Systems from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She lives and writes as a climate witness in Lingit Aaní at her family's fishcamp on the land of the Shtax'héenKwáan.

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