"These poems simultaneously celebrate the human spirt and the natural world, just as they critique our impact on the very landscapes within which we dwell. It is my hope that these poems become like mountain passes, navigable routes through the mountain range of different languages, cultures, classes, and ecological experiences. Our planet's most magnificent mountain ranges have long presented humans with forbidding barriers to travel, trade, and communication, and as such have become deeply lodged into our species psyche. While summiting peaks may provide a fleeting moments of nearly omniscient perspective, poetry can serve as lasting passes through which we may cross for generations to come. " -- Jonathan Stallings.