CATCH AND RELEASE

 

How do we humans manage our conflict between longing to see the natural world even as it disappears, and knowing that our adventures are contributing to its destruction?

 

CATCH AND RELEASE is a book-length narrative poem that follows the narrator into the sea; the watercolor illustrations bring the creatures of the deep to vivid life.

 

Off the coast of Mexico, the narrator finds a nurse shark held captive, and a reef so despoiled it’s colorless as a sepia photograph; she sets about freeing the shark while questioning her relationship to the natural world.

 

The book boldly takes on the common misapprehension that captive animals, particularly sharks and dolphins, enjoy being “petted” by humans, but the tone is saved from being didactic by the narrator's unflinching look at her own part in harming the natural world she loves.

 

Of my first illustrated narrative poem, The Catamount (Nomadic Press 2017) Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, said, “Through the loping rhythm of her words and the kinetic line of her drawings, Sarah Van Arsdale brings the legendary forest cat to crouching, slinking life.”

 

CATCH AND RELEASE is rooted in my studies and field work in wildlife biology, including a position in the Mammalogy and Ornithology Department at the California Academy of Sciences. I teach creative writing in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University, and I live in New York City and Oaxaca, Mexico.

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CATCH AND RELEASE is my seventh book.