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. 
 
At once a field guide, commonplace book, mash note to the planet, and lyrical autobiography, Karen Donovan’s Letters to Boulders finds the entire world—and the moon, too—in the handfuls of rocks that fill her pockets and line her windowsills. Here’s the inventory she offers, for example, to explain the geological law of uniformitarianism: “Christmas inflatables lying deflated on the lawns. Marriage, divorce, birth, death, work, play, illness, health, transporting happiness, corrosive despair, school lunches, giant flat-screens, tiny front-step gardens. Crushed zippo lighter and a lottery ticket in the street. Nuthatch calling.”
 —Josh Russell, author of King of the Animals: Stories
 
Karen Donovan’s Letters to Boulders is a small masterwork and a book far larger than its size. Combining prose and verse poems—inventories, would-be recipes, checklists of opposites, childhood sediment, philosophical deposits—with beautifully photographed stones, the book has coined its own realm of composite art. It is a stunning, original collection deeply pleasing to ear and eye. With a geologist’s keenness and a poet’s sense of acoustics, Donovan brings us what she herself calls “rough, rocking, rhythmic music” imbued with history and storytelling, wit and solemnity, humor and myth. So vibrant and granular are the photographs, I felt I had palmed every rock by the end of the book. The future and past are indeed in this music—gorgeous with grit and fizz and nerve. I, for one, will keep this book in my backpack like an amulet. Like that square of greenstone she asks us to always be in the habit to pick up. 
 
—Diane Raptosh, author of I Eric America