The environmental importance of the marshes lies in their capacity to filter pollutants, retard erosion, and help maintain a natural balance among the critters.

Award-winning photographer Dorothy Monnelly captures the yet-unspoiled beauty of one of the last natural ecosystems in the Northeast. In this collection of 57 large format, black and white photographs, the salt marsh is a solemn force rendered dramatically with crisp scans of Monnelly's original gelatin silver prints. As a native of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Monnelly executes her work with a familiarity and grace evocative of Ansel Adams. Her work is described in the forward by Jeanne Adams, director of the Ansel Adams Trust as capturing the marsh's "amazing sculptural quality." "Between Land and Sea" is grounded with an essay by journalist Doug Stewart, a regular contributor to "Smithsonian" and other magazines. Stewart's words provide a rich context for the images, as well as a strong case for preserving the marshlands. "Standing in an upland clearing overlooking a vast prairie of marsh grass, you can easily believe that a salt marsh is the closest thing a landscape comes to eternity. Even the Grand Canyon is eroding, after all, but a healthy salt marsh is renewed with each rising tide." Monnelly's book is indispensable to those who are conscious of the threat to our planet's sustainability. 57 black and white illustrations.

Inspired by the author’s childhood experience in the deep countryside of his native country, the Republic of the Congo, Tales from the Great Marsh represents a collection of short stories which illustrate a complex picture of life in a contemporary African society still rooted in its traditional beliefs and practices. Through short fictional stories, the author explores the complexity of social, cultural as well as religious, and spiritual experiences of a Bantu rural society when confronted with the challenges posed by specific existential situations such as death and modern politics, as well as the challenges posed by the encounter with the otherness. These fictional stories which marry myth and reality, are deployed towards producing knowledge that takes into account the surviving cultural aspects of old African societies formerly considered minor in studies of the continent’s past and present.

Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her "best story" to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett's range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel's themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett's decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett's determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields's place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region's saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others. Jewett's works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and has garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett's work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of "companionship" itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.

Renown landscape photographer Dorothy Monnelly discovered a box of her mother's poems in the attic of their home when she was still a teenager. Those poems are presented here in a sequence that follows her mother's life - from memories of childhood on through maturity, marriage, children and struggles with breast cancer. Her mother left these poems as her "creative" legacy for her daughters. They are shown here to evidence a dialogue between a mother and a daughter - each pursuing their own art forms. Dorothy Kerper Monnelly is a well known photographer whose last publication, Between Land & Sea: The Great Marsh(Braziller, 2007) earned her the following rave review: 'No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England's threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.' Legendary naturalist Edward O. Wilson had called her 'the Ansel Adams of the wetlands.' SELLING POINTS: *A beautiful pairing of a mother's poetry, written for her daughters, with photographs inspired by the poems, taken by her daughter, Dorothy Monnelly ILLUSTRATIONS: 35 b/w photographs