The Height and Depth of Everything

Katharine Haake's The Height and Depth of Everything is a book of journeys in which displaced women make unsettling forays into the new West. There, some violent expression of nature disrupts their lives, forcing them to readjust their vision of the world. Like the places they live—Washington state in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens; the rubble-strewn epicenter of Southern California after a recent earthquake; the flooded streets of a desert town in Utah—the characters in this collection are all "picking up the pieces" of lives shaken by both natural and spiritual disaster. In the precariousness of their lives, these characters find redemption by submitting to the indeterminacy of human life.