"It's thrilling to watch a poet create a world---fascinating when it turns out to be the one we live in. Kevin Pilkington's spare, subversive voice can conjure love from a donut, despair from Bloomingdale's. In "The Cat That Could Fly" a strange transcendence, made of lies, travels way beyond the self. Reading this beautiful and quietly visceral book, it's easy to forget each of us lives only once and dies alone."---Dennis Nurkse, author of The Border Kingdom --Book Jacket.

"This is a poet unafraid of being understood, who will not hide behind decorativeness or the oblique. Read these poems aloud and you will hear an authentic and quintessentially American voice not only writing but also speaking to you."-Thomas Lux "I take guilty pleasure in the poems of Kevin Pilkington, and consider him an essential voice in contemporary poetry."-Jay Parini "In this rich collection of tender poems, he celebrates the small consolations of daily life that offer spiritual relief in the face of disappointment and loss. There are no easy epiphanies here-just one poet working as hard as he can to get through daily life with dignity and grace."-Jim Daniels

Once considered the antithesis of a verdant and vibrant ecosystem, cities are now being hailed as highly efficient and complex social ecological systems. Emerging from the streets of the post-industrial city are well-tended community gardens, rooftop farms and other viable habitats capable of supporting native flora and fauna. At the forefront of this transformation are the citizens living in the cities themselves. As people around the world increasingly relocate to urban areas, this book discusses how they engage in urban stewardship and what civic participation in the environment means for democracy. Drawing on data collected through a two-year study of volunteer stewards who planted trees as part of the MillionTreesNYC initiative in the United States, this book examines how projects like this can make a difference to the social fabric of a city. It analyses quantitative survey data along with qualitative interview data that enables the volunteers to share their personal stories and motivations for participating, revealing the strong link between environmental stewardship and civic engagement. As city governments in developed countries are investing more and more in green infrastructure campaigns to change the urban landscape, this book sheds light on the social importance of these initiatives and shows how individuals’ efforts to reshape their cities serve to strengthen democracy. It draws out lessons that are highly applicable to global cities and policies on sustainability and civic engagement.

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction • Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award. During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clear-cuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests, which evolved over millennia into intricate, complex ecosystems. Among other topics, she also touches on the boom-and-bust history of logging and the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. She also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, our slowest-growing “renewable” resource and joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.

In the bestselling tradition of Michael Pollan's "Second Nature," this fascinating and unique historical work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and trees across the entire span of our nation's history.