Rantala is a Pacific Northwest poet, heavily affected by indigenous art, the weather, the formerly ungentrified personalities of cities up and down the Pacific coast, but not regionally bound. Here though, after being plunged in Eastern Washington in 2007, into that dramatic, inspiring landscape – living within its powerful influence and affected greatly by it – she began a series of poems responding to the geography around her: the scablands, the Palouse, the Columbia Basin, the Gorge. “Once you get outside the cities,” she says, “this can be a lonely region. It has been washed over by floods and turned up, down and over by volcanic activity, eaten away by erosion. It’s also a threatening place – once you’re off the road, you are really off the road – but it has a way of paring itself down, through its layers and bones, to show you something essential about itself and about you.”
These poems, accompanied by landscape photographs, travel from the northwest corner of Washington State, Dungeness Spit, to the far southeast in the Palouse.
