Available for pre-order
Coming fall 2026!
Advanced Praise for Afield:
“Linnea Ryshke’s Afield is a radical work of relational creation that refuses the conventional approaches to literature and art that works with ‘nature’ or ‘animals.’ Instead, Afield attends to the bodies, complexity, dignity, and relationality of all beings, nonhuman and human. Ryshke takes on the difficult task of shedding the safety of categories and narratives, and creates her work out of curiosity, humility, diligent attention and openness. The resulting work does the remarkable; creates out of human language and technology something beautifully strange that honors the dignity and life of other beings. Even though Afield is unflinching in its engagement with the brutal impact of human bodies on nonhuman beings, particularly in the scientific and conservation sphere, it is not misanthropic—the humans that move across the spaces of this book emerge in the same way as the nonhuman animals do—through curiosity and attention, and without imposed judgment.”—Jennifer Calkins, author of Fugitive Assemblage
“Linnea Ryshke’s Afield is luminous. It’s a work that is haunting, heartbreaking, breathtaking, and visionary in equal measure. Moving seamlessly between literary genres and mixed media artistic expression, this extraordinary book asks us to upend the very essence of how and what we think we know. The animals in these pages are often unseen, only their tracks and traces visible in the imagery, but their presence viscerally materializes in these haunting traces and in the staggering beauty and poignancy of Ryshke’s poetic reading of their lives, their selves, their very souls—and the way human interests and desires too often eclipse the possibility of their flourishing. This is a book that can change how we see and understand our multispecies world at a visual, spiritual, and fundamentally embodied level; the obligations we have to other earth beings; and the possibilities for cultivating a way of living characterized not by violence, indifference, and ignorance but by reverence, respect, and humility for those we can and cannot know.”—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves
“In this remarkable lyrical reckoning, Linnea Ryshke guides us through Rumi’s liminal field between wrongdoing and rightdoing. Adeptly structuring the book into four innovative shapes: a track, a box, a mark, and a ring, Ryshke, as poet and artist, becomes an embodied witness to reindeer herding, alligator cognitive research, wild boar management, and the monitoring of migratory birds. Afield ethically troubles the human acts of studying, managing, and saving our fellow animals, and movingly urges us towards more tender ways of knowing and being.”—Sangamithra Iyer, author of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed
“In the give and take between language and image, between human and nonhuman animal—reindeer, alligator, boar, and bird—Linnea Ryshke’s Afield asks us to leave the usual track and travel afield with her narrator to consider the inherent cruelty and violence embedded in even the so-called ordinary human practices of animal naming, conservation, and science. An accomplished visual artist and poet, Ryshke works in multiple registers to evoke not only human ignorance and neglect in ‘this age of disappearance’ but also the possibility of a reconnected and re-enchanted world of love, ‘not as a firm grip, but a brave shore.’ This is a gorgeous and heartbreaking book.”—Kathryn Kirkpatrick, author of Creature
“Through gorgeous images and exquisite language, Afield leads us to snow, forest, pen and net to reunite with our fellow species and pay attention to the ironies of our animal management when we can’t even manage the human beingness of ourselves. Ryshke’s fearless words are spells for connecting species that we can conjure by turning the pages to see letters become leaves, wind, fur and hoofprints. Take your time with this book, keep it close, open the covers whenever you feel worldly compassion drifting. Afield offers our souls back to us in cupped hands so that we may remember we are animals too. It is a book that transforms poets into painters and photographers into poets and carries all of us gently back to our blessedly more than human origins.”—Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings: A Collection of Poems about Extinct Animals
“In Afield, Linnea Ryshke calls reindeer, alligators, feral pigs, and birds to the page with visceral, compassionate, and reverent attention. If our world is one where ‘machines devour the silence’ and scientific endeavor seemingly cannot proceed without violence, Ryshke’s work offers us the space and the silence required for repair. Though richly musical and visually stunning, Afield is, at its core, a book about listening, about attuning ourselves to animals that we may walk differently alongside them. This is required reading for anyone invested in what the weaving of human and animal worlds could—should? must?—look like now.”—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater
“Darkness glows in the potent hush of Linnea Ryshke’s Afield. In the book’s images—her brilliant artworks in plethoric media and her poems’ shifting silhouettes—silences whisper on the winds of an ancient forest, in cloven hoofprints, in inadequate names for other-than-human species. Ryshke’s deep personal engagement with traces left by birds, boars, reindeer, and others who are safest when they remain beyond our reach, draws those other Earthlings’ necessary distance into a surreal, intense intimacy. Hers is a powerful practice of listening, meditation, and careful withdrawal.”—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
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