A Ranch Bordering the Salty River

Stephen Page’s twenty-poem collection, “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River,” explores the second half of a life, as Page’s narrator navigates the transitions from city to country, from intellectual toil to physical labor, and from youth to middle age. 

In language rich with natural imagery and tense with the poles of joy and disillusionment, Page has written a collection that leaves an indelible imprint. These layered stories-in-poems render birth extraordinary, death ordinary, and the natural world a disappearing muse, a forested siren the narrator yearns to know. Ever relevant and always beautiful, “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River” contemplates the possession of land alongside the inscrutable mystery of the natural world.