“It’s not easy,” Catherine Reid writes, “to love a person and a place in equal measure.” Love she does, however, as described in these intimate, lyric essays about the land and people around her. With the inside perspective of a native daughter combined with her outsider status as a lesbian, Reid explores such paradoxes as those that arise from harnessing wild rivers or legalizing same-sex marriage. Her fascination with natural phenomena—whether bird hibernation, the arrival of fishers in suburbia, or the explosion of amphibious life in the wet weeks of spring—is captured in writing that pays as much attention to the sounds of a sentence as to the rhythms of the landscapes she wanders. Ultimately, however, Reid finds herself having to choose between her lover and her home place.