Leif's Reviews > Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains

Barbara Hurd has done something wonderful here, something elegant and penetrating and absolutely riveting. Using the wrack line as her guide, its inhabitants as her muses, Hurd writes out a sometimes melancholy, always graceful interlocking series of essays certainly worth your while.

Wherever the sea---like others' wants---begins to encroach, there's evidence of scrimmage. Here, crab claws and feathers, fraying rope and shredded kelp, an unended dory and a man I avoid because he wants to talk again about shamanic journeys. I'm less interested at the moment in where things are going, more in what happens if they come apart. ("Wordwrack: Openings", 9)

It's exactly this note that rings true across these essays.