The scientist is the close cousin of the poet and Karen Donovan is both. In her witty and engaging Letters to Boulders 45 stunning photographs of stones are paired with prose pieces inspired by their appearance or origins. Geographic forces-erratics, tarns, glaciers, and xenoliths-mirror social forces, as the author ponders how we are constructed, what adheres, moves around, holds up or crumbles. The collection concludes with a field guide to the stones-a brilliant new take on the glossary, in which definition itself becomes a kind of poem. Occupying a new niche in nature writing Letters to Boulders is both a poetic meditation on the mutable qualities of the earth we tread upon and a visual study of their beauty.