Toucan Nest [Paperback]

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. InToucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs—refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

 InToucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her encounter with the unfamiliar realm of Costa Rica has produced a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

 “Shumaker’s vividToucan Nestis about learning to see—Costa Rica serving as the textbook. Between the parentheses of arrival and departure, the pages burst with lessons—rich, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying. For us, looking over her shoulder, it is education by proxy. So iridescent is Shumaker’s language, we are there, floating downriver with the crocodiles, watching panicky iguanas hustling from a fire, the basilisk lizard ‘zipping / zigzag on hind legs,’ a flash of green and ruby eyes, and oh, did you hear it? the love cry of the jaguar and the cry of the quetzal whose morning song brings the whole blessèd world to life. A dazzle of a book.”

—Jane Hirshfield