El Verano Burning

El Verano Burning is Nancy Cherry's first major collection of poetry since Gardening in the Deep End (Redfruit Press, 2006). It is a lyrical travelogue of memory, a collage of her youth in California's central valley, and of her life among the network of hills and esteros of West Marin and the iconic intersections of Sonoma and San Francisco. Her agile meditations and engaging narratives of childhood, family, work, and relationships are rich with the bittersweet feelings of passage and loss, of recurrence and return. "I know this road. / I know it leads back / through the raw and stubbled truth, / back to the place / I keep driving away from-"