Description
In his poetry, Rawlins evokes the natural world and the American West in exciting detail. Philosophical, harsh, beautiful, gritty, in his poems Rawlins reveals himself to be a "non-romantic Romantic." Winner of the Poetry award from the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association in 1999.

Reviews
"For writer and mountaineer C. L. Rawlins, poetry is a kind of low-tech Global Positioning System—an instrument tempered by heart, head, and senses that tell him his place on the rugged, wild Earth. And it is a place from which he never loses sight of the elemental amazement to find himself in a body and to find that body alive in a world of staggering beauty and grief. He is an anti-romantic Romantic whose poems sing the hard-won pleasures of consciousness coming into awareness and form." —Alison Hawthorne Deming

"As he gives himself to the ceaseless pressure of the winds and undertakes the long, bumpy roads that stretch between him and so many that he loves, C. L. Rawlins also finds a world of gritty miracles. This collection, with its cadences as subtle and shifting as the weather, vividly evokes the high-plains country of the poet’s heart." —John Elder

"C. L. Rawlins brings water back from a spring and notices