Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems gathers lyrics whose worldliness is rooted in both travel and "the lexicon of the local," in which "Winter is going to / prove whatever it has to prove / as I intend to spend what I provisioned / giving away all I have left to give." The book brings together pieces from David Axelrod' previous nine collections along with thirty-two brilliant new poem, the whole a kind of symphonic effort to clarify the unity of consciousness, water, wind, and stone, all life, in fact, and the planet itself.