What a great way to entice someone to read a book: “Like a prize-fighter boxing over his weight, Stephan Torre has long made his home in the wilderness, negotiating environments that are hostile, inhospitable and often dangerous. Places where a neighbor might ask without irony, ‘don’t ya wanna stay here / and fight the elements?… The wilderness Torre describes is not pastoral; forests and wildlife coexist with tractors, chainsaws and gutted animals. Your place there is earned…” says Gary Young. In a summer home just north and east of the Cascadia bioregion, in Atlin, British Columbia, poet Stephan Torre makes a home with his “Pilota,” and makes poems that are “lyric and muscular,” two words not often heard in the same breath describing poetry, but are accurate. His poems draw on his experiences in Montana, Northern California, and British Columbia as well as a life spent teaching college, farming, logging, in construction, as a counselor, and usually off-the-grid. Check out the book Red Obsidian, by Stephan Torre in Atlin.