Seven Words for Wind: Essays and Field Notes from Alaska's Pribilof Islands

Seven Words for Wind: Essays and Field Notes from Alaska's Pribilof Islands by MacLeish, Sumner. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780945397359.

Far off the coast of mainland Alaska lie the remote Pribilof Islands, surrounded by a wild, rich sea. The largest island, St. Paul, is just fourteen miles long and eight wide. For over a decade, Sumner MacLeish worked, lived on, and came to love this place, its fierce weather, its abundant wildlife, and its people - about 600 Aleuts. Her spare, imagistic prose illuminates the unforgiving darkness and the unimaginable beauty of this subarctic landscape. The pieces in Seven Words for Wind are deeply subjective, describing immense storms that sweep across the seathe frenzy of a trapped herd of reindeeror the Aleuts traditional subsistence seal harvest. MacLeishs writing is grounded in her own experiences and in her attentive, open curiousity, finding light, humore, and companionship where it might least be expected.