Reviews
The River You Touch
“A heartfelt memoir of life and fatherhood in Big Sky country . . . Through a collection of vignettes, the author shares his concerns for the environment, the effects of the appropriation of land from Native inhabitants, and the emotions the landscape stirs in him. ‘The angler standing in the river is not so much absolved of time as disburdened of it, able to shirk its weight’ . . . Nature lovers will be captivated by Dombrowski’s lyrical descriptions of the land and its wildlife, while parents are sure to relate to his familial challenges and sacrifice. A beautifully and poignantly written tribute to a beloved landscape and its spirit.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Nature writer Dombrowski evokes both wilderness splendor and the hardscrabble effort of living paycheck to paycheck in this exquisite work. In lyrical language replete with vivid imagery, Dombrowski reflects on his 25 years as a fly-fishing guide, his uncertainty over writing and poetry, his impending fatherhood and ‘fear of ushering children into a periled world’ . . . he renders his love of the natural world in incandescent prose: ‘the land itself . . . a blessing, yes, but also a kind of passage, a shaft of fall light shone down on a trace path that leads out of a previously impenetrable wood.’ Punctuated by the frank candor of a writer weighing sacrifice and art, this introspective memoir will hook fans of A River Runs Through It.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In slow, eddying prose, [The River You Touch] mines an ordinary life for evocative reflections on family, friendship, and the meaning found in a rugged landscape . . . Suggesting that, like a river, a life well lived includes ‘headlong shots through roaring box canyons’ in addition to ‘the hypnotic, elliptical movement of water running back on itself,’ The River You Touch is a profound, moving memoir that contemplates the earth, family, and community...”
—Foreword Reviews
"A touching and moving story about a family that chooses to live in the ‘wild’ and call a river home. I absolutely love this memoir and I think you will, too, especially if you’re a fan of water.”
—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
“Heartfelt, moving, and gorgeously written, The River You Touch is a love song to the rivers of Montana, a love song to a way of life. Dombrowski writes with tenderness and insight and with a deep, personal gratitude to the rivers that have taught him who he is—a husband, a father, a fisherman, a poet, a person who loves the earth as well as mourns it. What a tremendous achievement.”
—Emily Ruskovich, author of Idaho
“Midway through The River You Touch, poet and naturalist Chris Dombrowski tells us, ‘To truly fathom a river, is to know it from its headwaters to its mouth…’ To truly fathom a life—one’s place, community, family, history, purpose on earth—is the sacred pursuit of this moving and beautifully written memoir. Here is the story of a man attempting to reckon with his cultural inheritance, his vocation, his past, and his responsibilities to family, land, and history. Along the route, he continuously encounters reminders of his own mortal smallness and, simultaneously, the numinous interconnection of all beings. Like the river, Dombrowski’s story is complicated and enlivened by all it touches, ‘an extension of everything upstream and down’—from the joys, doubts, and terrors of parenthood; to the precarity of making a life in art; to the rivers and mountains that are both his source of sustenance and place of worship; and the fraught layers of histories that map over it all. By the end, I’d fallen hopelessly in love with Dombrowski’s Montana, not just its rivers and mountains, but the unforgettable cast of characters that populate his world—from children who speak in beguiling riddles to crusty old hunters whose colloquial panache rivals the naughtiest Shakespeare. Dombrowski brings a near-religious attentiveness to the details of his world, both our wise guide and awe-struck fellow-passenger.”
—Lisa Wells, author of Believers
“You won’t soon read a more beautiful book, nor one so earthy, wise, delicious, and alive. This is not a book about fish or rivers or Montana or parenting. This is a book, to paraphrase another poet, plain and simple, to break open the frozen sea within.”
—Rick Bass
“In the way a fable points us toward rightness, so The River You Touch leads us to a necessary truth: that deep knowledge and love of a place shapes us in all the ways we will need to survive. With poetry, vulnerability, and crisp storytelling, Dombrowski takes us into a wild, river-thrummed Montana, and into the stormswept territory of marriage and family. It’s a journey with a guide who knows the country at a cellular level, and whose bafflement and wonder renews our own. The magic of the book is that I came away convinced that learning to love a trout, or an autumn snowfall, or a wolf crossing a river, would teach me to love a friend or a partner in pain—and so to love and be connected to all beings. Damn.”
—Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars, The River, and The Guide
“With The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski has established himself at the forefront of American writers of place. This beautiful, clear-eyed, tender memoir is as intimate as a love letter, brimming with wise observations on family, parenthood, home, duty, and passion. The Montana within these pages is wild and rugged, yes. But it is also as gentle as a cold stream running through your fingers or a child sleeping in your arms. I loved this book.”
—Nickolas Butler, bestselling author of Godspeed and Shotgun Lovesongs
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish
“A lyrical, genre-defying tribute. Drawing on Caribbean history and the evolution of fly-fishing, Dombrowski’s foray into nonfiction proves thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming.”
—Publishers Weekly **STARRED REVIEW**
“There’s a tremendous amount of information here on the geological, botanical, biological and human history of the region, but the author uses only what’s necessary to the story and relates it in evocative, concise language that reminded me of Gary Snyder one minute and John McPhee the next. In this way we get an effortless sense of place … [made me] wish that more fishing books were written by poets.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Delightfully elegant…In waters frequented by literary greats like Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey, Dombrowski is in heady company tackling this subject, but proves himself more than up to the challenge…This is the stuff of men and boats and saltwater and meditations on what it means to take the sea in search of one great catch. Have no doubt—fishing literature has a new star.”
—Booklist
“Dombrowski elevates the fly-fishing-as-meditation narrative by the sheer fact that he’s so damn good at writing about it…A book worth reading whether or not bonefish excite you.”
—Outside
“This is some of the best writing that you’ll ever read about fishing. But Body of Water achieves even more—it’s a passionate, luminous, completely delightful book.”
—Ian Frazier
“Pours forth beauties, subtleties, dark history and insight with an unforced lyrical power I associate with no lesser word than ‘masterpiece.’ … I’ve read no book anything like Body of Water, and enjoyed no book in memory more.”
—David James Duncan
“An immersion, a baptism…Dombrowski brings an auteur’s sensibility to framing (the history of bonefishing and its most essential guide)…A philosophical exploration that elevates (the story) into a spiritual memoir in the tradition of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
—Orion
“A wonderful book. An evocation of the why not the how in angling.”
—Forbes
“A gifted storyteller...Dombrowski’s talent is on full display here, his tight and rhythmic prose reminding one of the gentle and relaxing lap of water against the hull of a fishing boat on a sunny and windless day.”
—American Booksellers Association
“The lyrical narrative (about ecosystem exploitation, class conflict, wealth inequity, race relations, and nature as the catalyst for self-awareness) strikes a delicate balance between reflective memoir and reportage. To the author, fishing demands (more than) attention, patience, wonder and balance. It is praying.”
—Minnesota Star-Tribune
"Like an updated version of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ (Body of Water is) a cautionary tale, but rarely do cautionary tales dazzle like this…a credit to Dombrowski’s prose, which torques and twists and glistens into view much like the bonefish itself….a book about seeking that which we cannot see, of understanding a place and its people not nearly as foreign as we might imagine. (The reader is left) with many lessons, though this one most of all: whether on a skiff or in a book, the guide matters. And Dombrowski’s the one you want."
—Los Angeles Review
“Brings to life the remarkable natural beauty of the bonefish flats and their flora and fauna…The portrayal of (this) complex ecosystem left me with deep concern for how much longer this treasure will last in the face of global pressures on our oceans and environment”
—Bloomberg (a 2016 Best Book)
“Chris Dombrowski is…a wonderful storyteller….His passion for life and his curiosity about the natural world are apparent on every page. Writing this beautiful is as rare as the elusive bonefish he so diligently pursues.”
—Powells.com (a Powell’s Pick)
“A superbly cast work of nonfiction that deserves a wide readership. The sheer line speed of Chris Dombrowski’s prose is a joy to watch unfold. At ever turn he brings precision and originality to his sparkling depiction of flats fishing in sentences that would make Tom McGuane lean back in the batter’s box. (An) extraordinary book.
—Gray’s Sporting Journal
“As captivating and eye-opening as McGuane’s The Longest Silence. (Generations) of angler-readers have been reared on writers like McGuane and Duncan, as well as older masters like Hemingway and Maclean. The next generation will have a new writer on their shelves: Chris Dombrowski.”
—The Drake, John Larison
“a mythic journey. If you have fished, or wanted to fish, or just stepped out of doors with some expectancy, (this) is the book for you. The Buddha said “days spent fishing do not count against one’s allotted days. Body of Water tells us why.”
—Michigan Public Radio
“…flashes of Melville…keen, enthusiastic observations; reflections on fishing and life that shift with the changing tides and angles of light; prose presented with delicacy, power and skill; and raptures so vividly grounded in tropic details that the reader will share a four-sense tableau of being ‘there’.
—Fly Rod and Reel
“(Body of Water) quests to tell a fundamental story of integrity in the face of overwhelming odds, (exploring) the ironies and big questions of life. Gorgeously written…this book (is) tender, poignant, funny, and very well worth the effort.”
—Big Sky Journal (a 2016 Best Book)
“A beautifully rendered travelogue/memoir (that) adeptly shifts focus between a microscopic fascination with the natural world and the vast forms of racial oppression, conservation and ecotourism. Body of Water flawlessly realizes this world of allure and destruction.”
—High Desert Journal
“Even those who have never cast for a fish or laid eyes on the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean will finish Body of Water with a sense of awe and wonder and a commitment toward the conservation of our imperiled planet.”
—Steamboat Pilot and Today
“Reflections on water, the allure of fishing and its dark history….make this book great. In the last chapters…I pulled out the pen and began underlining and making notations. I started to bend pages and annotate moving passages, telltale signs of falling in love with a book.”
—The Missoulian
“Share any of its author’s fascinations and Body of Water is likely to become a favorite. Listing those fascinations is tough—but among them are water….the ravishing scent of a perfect phrase in perfect bloom, (and) the human mind ennobled by its attempts to reconcile the unknowable.”
—Missoula Independent
“Dombrowski explores the zen-like balance he experiences while bonefishing and makes a good case that out on a skiff in the Bahama flats ‘we enter the prayerful closet of the senses and close the door.’ Fly-fishing mysticism at its best.”
—Shelf-Awareness
Earth Again
“I read and reread these urgent, burning poems, I found myself underlining and starring and scribbling down not only kneebuckling images and turns of phrase, but commandments and questions to live by. I wept reading this book. I was wrecked reading this…a holy book.”
—Joe Wilkins, Orion
“Not just for nature lovers, Earth Again is one of the most beautiful books of poetry I have read in years. Musically, deftly, sharply, it deals with birth, sex, death, and so much in between, with a light touch that includes comedy, fantasy, satire, somehow magically in the service of deep meaning, deep feeling. Dombrowski is heir to Galway Kinnell, writing of the everyday–unforgettably.”
Alicia Ostriker
Earth Again is an arresting, beautiful collection of poems. Chris Dombrowski is musical and intellectual in equal measure, and the poems here are memorable in every way—surprising and strange, moving and alarming, delightful and frightening. This is important new work.”
Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
“Chris Dombrowski descends from the best of our nature poets: John Haines, Jeffers and Wordsworth. Earth Again is a lovely, lovely book.”
Dorianne Laux
“Memory should not be called knowledge, Keats wrote, and yet in Chris Dombrowski’s patient hands, the memory of the natural world is knowledge indeed….This is a generous, clear-eyed, lyricism. The wisdom of one who sees a flying object and says it could be a helicopter or archangel. Beautiful poems.”
Ilya Kaminsky
“…Dombrowski apprentices himself, again and again, to feeling the earth precisely, whether glorying or grieving, or caught in their impassable coincidence. I am wowed by his courage and his care. Nothing escapes his scrutiny, least of all the medium of his own imperfect heart. EARTH AGAIN. We are here to be schooled, to be shaken from our grossest, and even our smallest forms of negligence. Dombrowski is a poet of conscience. A river-guide in every sense. A psalmist overcoming a cynic. We are fortunate, I think, to have this kind of poet still among us.”
Sarah Gridley
“Chris Dombrowski’s new book, Earth Again, is extraordinarily powerful and graceful.”
Jim Harrison
“In Earth Again, Chris Dombrowski taps into our collective fears about the future of the planet and the ways in which we can and cannot connect as humans with the natural world. The magnificence of Earth Again is that every poem seems to emerge from the very dirt, the very ground on which Dombrowski walks. Unlike many collections these days, which muse on nature and ecology from a great remove, this book gives us a speaker unafraid to sing to us from the middle of the woods, his hands covered in the stuff of this world he loves.”
James Crews, Prairie Schooner
“…it can be argued that Missoula hasn’t had a transcendent poet of place since the immortal Richard Hugo passed away in 1982. That may be changing. Chris Dombrowski, a Michigan-born poet who fell in love with Missoula upon moving here in 1999, has just released Earth Again, his second full-length book of poetry… a stunning work, rife with gorgeous images of Western lives and landscapes, imbued with a hardscrabble perception that will be instantly recognized by those who have committed their lives and families to this most demanding of paradises.”
Nick Davis, Missoula Independent
“This is a full spectrum collection – complete in color, tone, speed, and emotion. As vibrant as fresh blood on snow, as soft as a pine forest floor under foot, as loving as body heat on a cold night, Dombrowski’s poems gather the earth’s beauty, wicked or otherwise and binds that beauty with words strong enough to hold it together.”
Foster Neil, Michigan Poet
by cold water
"By Cold Water is a wonderful book of poems. I read it several times utterly engrossed in its natural imagery, the grace in which the process of revelation tells us what we didn’t know, describes what we never noticed. Dombrowski is a fine poet. I could have said that he’s a fine young poet because he’s only thirty-three but in truth he’s a thousand years old like any fine poet.”
Jim Harrison
“Intimates of wasp nests and barbed wire, of mountains’ minerality and the light sequestered inside a horse’s mane, Chris Dombrowski’s poems word the world-and their reader-into largeness, with specificity, tenderness, and passion.”
Jane Hirshfield
“Language enfolding around language, punctuation cast aside, and the watering mouth of our ear and tongue wagging after such beauty: this is the poetic terrain of a young poet whose work holds so much promise (and so much of it already fulfilled in this wonderful book).”
Green Mountains Review
As we say of a car, it has clean lines; or of an ant’s eyes that they are closely engaged; the way we exclaim of an image that it bridges stars, Chris Dombrowski’s poems ennoble their page.”
William Gass, Two-Time National Book Critics Award Winner
“Dombrowski, in (this) exciting first full-length volume, seems to work from a loose, ancient, explosive formula: poem = dream = vision = song = prophecy = myth. (His) work draws on primal sources of energy and music….and suggest(s) that if anything can save the forsaken world, it may be visionary song.”
Neo
“To stand upright and see the eye ascend: this is Dombrowski’s core proposal. In By Cold Water location beautifully becomes both virtue and task of virtue. These poems are truly afoot with their vision, and I welcome them.”
Donald Revell
