The Valley Of 10 000 Smokes

On June 6, 1912 the largest volcanic eruption on Earth during the 20th century occurred. Thus was born the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. In Gary Freeburg's photographs one can still feel the steam-filled air, sense the deafening noise of the eruption, & grasp the incredible physical forces that created this alluring landscape.

A natural history and celebration of the famous bears and salmon of Brooks River. On the Alaska Peninsula, where exceptional landscapes are commonplace, a small river attracts attention far beyond its scale. Each year, from summer to early fall, brown bears and salmon gather at Brooks River to create one of North America’s greatest wildlife spectacles. As the salmon leap from the cascade, dozens of bears are there to catch them (with as many as forty-three bears sighted in a single day), and thousands of people come to watch in person or on the National Park Service’s popular Brooks Falls Bearcam. The Bears of Brooks Falls tells the story of this region and the bears that made it famous in three parts. The first forms an ecological history of the region, from its dormancy 30,000 years ago to the volcanic events that transformed it into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The central and longest section is a deep dive into the lives of the wildlife along the Brooks River, especially the bears and salmon. Readers will learn about the bears’ winter hibernation, mating season, hunting rituals, migration patterns, and their relationship with Alaska’s changing environment. Finally, the book explores the human impact, both positive and negative, on this special region and its wild population.

In a life full of chaos and travel, Elizabeth Bishop managed to preserve and even partially catalog, a large collection—more than 3,500 pages of drafts of poems and prose, notebooks, memorabilia, artwork, hundreds of letters to major poets and writers, and thousands of books—now housed at Vassar College. Informed by archival theory and practice, as well as a deep appreciation of Bishop’s poetics, the collection charts new territory for teaching and reading American poetry at the intersection of the institutional archive, literary study, the liberal arts college, and the digital humanities. The fifteen essays in this collection use this archive as a subject, and, for the first time, argue for the critical importance of working with and describing original documents in order to understand the relationship between this most archival of poets and her own archive. This collection features a unique set of interdisciplinary scholars, archivists, translators, and poets, who approach the archive collaboratively and from multiple perspectives. The contributions explore remarkable new acquisitions, such as Bishop’s letters to her psychoanalyst, one of the most detailed psychosexual memoirs of any twentieth century poet and the exuberant correspondence with her final partner, Alice Methfessel, an important series of queer love letters of the 20th century. Lever Press’s digital environment allows the contributors to present some of the visual experience of the archive, such as Bishop’s extraordinary “multi-medial” and “multimodal” notebooks, in order to reveal aspects of the poet’s complex composition process.