Level Watch

Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery's visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share...