Bloodlines

On the river with his fly rod or in the woods with his rifle, award-winning poet Todd Davis shares his observations on life, death, and the natural world—and how these things have given shape to his relationships with his father and sons.

As a hunter and an angler, Davis reflects on the cycles of life and death that we as humans can never truly extract ourselves from, embracing both the complicated joy of the hunt and the gravity of taking another life. It is this relationship with the wildness in nature that has also shaped his relationships with his father and his sons, giving these generations of men a place to know and express love, connection, reverence, and grace. Set on his home mountain in Appalachia, with selected stories traveling to the wilderness of the mountain west, this collection asks what we might give back to the world that sustains us.