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I’ve explored Ultima Thule from top to bottom without even leaving my couch. Books books books. I sometimes think, when I read a lot before a trip, that the actual going there is almost anticlimactic. Last week I wrote about Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven and her dreamy imagery and her love for this often brutal mostly-frozen place called Greenland. What was most appealing to me about This Cold Heaven and… Read More
From the preface of This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich: …I was on hands and knees on a lateral moraine caressing alpine fescue and sniffing dwarf harbells while icebergs, big as warehouses, drifted by. Glistening white, they were the photographic negatives of Greenland’s black mountain fringe. (p. xi) It took me awhile to read This Cold Heaven, mostly because it is too beautiful to read quickly. I sat here at… Read More