Edited by John Wilks, this is a fine selection of both poetry and short fiction that represents the very best writing from 12 weeks of The NOT The Whittaker Prize 2013. Contributors from the UK, Canada, Australia and the USA

This final volume in the author's trilogy, which began with Stirring the Mud and Entering the Stone gives nature writing a human dimension and throws light on the mysterious and overlooked wonders on beaches as far-flung as Morocco, St. Croix, or Alaska, and as familiar as California and Cape Cod.

THE WRACK LINE is a moving collection of poems about how family, loss, the passage of time, and social/environmental stresses demarcate symbolic wrack lines across our lives as we scatter the flotsam from our choices behind us. From personal lyric poems to narrative poems about hurricane Katrina, global warming and violence, the poet uses imagery and a modern take on myths that transform language into beautiful, sensual, sometimes lush depictions of the world in its dark complexities.

A beautifully illustrated field guide to the Mid-Atlantic region, from the Jersey Shore to Cape Hatteras The Outer Banks of North Carolina and the beaches of the Mid-Atlantic Coast are among the most popular tourist destinations in the United States. This book is a richly illustrated field guide that surveys the geology, environmental history, natural history, and human history of a region that spans the eastern seaboard from Sandy Hook in New Jersey south to Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is organized around environments, not particular locations. Included are the geology of beaches and barrier islands, the environmental history of the region, as well as detailed looks at the natural history of beaches, dunes, maritime forests, coastal marshes, and estuaries. Also covered are issues involving human activity and climate change, which have become dominant forces shaping geophysical and biological environments. This guide will enable users to walk into a salt marsh or onto a beach and identify much of what they see.

In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. Entering the Stone provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.

In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, 9imagination, and fear.