Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison

From Mark Slouka, San Francisco Chronicle: Ken Lamberton would like you to believe his book, ``Wilderness and Razor Wire,'' is about the smell of creosote and rain on the wind, about hawkmoths dipping from the wells of cactus. Don't believe him. Don't be misled by the drawings of brittlebush and silverleaf oak (all done by Lamberton himself), or the well-intentioned, avuncular foreword by Richard Shelton, who taught Lamberton writing in prison workshops and at the University of Arizona. Though the nature writing here may be some of the best to come our way in a generation, this is not first and foremost a book about poppies and peppergrass. It is about the soul in pain. Reading it is like chatting with someone on the street and suddenly noticing there is blood running down his side. All of which is to say that Lamberton (for the past 12 years an inmate of Tucson's Santa Rita Prison) has written something entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays on the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, whose true subject, and greatest accomplishment, may be its own narrative voice.

Ken Lamberton lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he writes about the nature of the desert outside his window. His essays are appearing in magazines like Manoa, South Dakota Review, Northern Lights, Alligator Juniper, Green Mountains Review, Puerto Del Sol, and the Gettysburg Review, and, most recently, David Quammen's anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 and Scott Slovic's anthology Getting Over the Color Green. He is a former nonfiction editor for the Sonora Review and is currently completing his MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona.