Excerpt from Riverine by Angela Palm, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Something about our neighborhood had caused my parents to set physical boundaries of roaming allowance that did not extend much farther than our backyard. The road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, had no sidewalks, and there were many drunks, as we called them, who often drove recklessly down our shared street. If you were playing on the road and a car came, you didn't simply step aside. You ran out of the way. There were also near vagabonds, supposedly unsavory individuals who stayed a spell in one of the makeshift pole barns or partially dilapidated trailers and then moved on. these were factors in our boundaries, though I didn't yet know how or why.

the area to which we were restricted had once formed the bed of the Kankakee River and often flooded. Every few years, when the human-made part of the river swelled and reclaimed its old course, our home became an island. Periods of flood became epic adventures, because our house was constructed in the exact place where the river ought to have been. Where it once had been. Floods gave us the opportunity to go back to a time when sustenance came from the land, as did fear and injury. We learned from our neighbors, who were active Revolutionary War reenactors and rendezvousers, how to suck the thin pink trills of grapevine when we were thirsty. We practiced spearing fish on gigantic carp, the mud-veined fish that seemed to rise up from the bloated overflow like Loch Ness monsters, with the point of an arrow. Leaning over the edge of a canoe, we would look the mythical beasts right in the eye. then, wham,we hit them straight through the spine, justifying their deaths by the fact that they were inedible and served literally no useful purpose on Earth.

One day I asked my mother about the space between the pink dots. "Look at the map. Dot here. Dot there. No middle. "What was in the yellow? Could we go there and find out?

My mother was a good sport, letting my child's mind discover these small curiosities according to its own will. We got into the car and drove past two houses. the first was Corey's house. The second house belonged to my aunt Carleen, who was my mother's younger sister. We turned right, passing the River, the bar and restaurant that sat fifteen feet from the riverbank. I would someday get a job there—a rite of passage in this neighborhood that I looked forward to. We then drove across the bridge that spanned the actual river, the mighty Kankakee, as we moved along the path I'd traced on the map with my finger. Then we stopped. I'd been holding my breath.

We hadn't driven far at all.

"This is it," she said. "This is the part between the two towns."

Through the back window of our van, I could still see our house. On the other side of our newly constructed fence, smoke rose from a narrow pipe that stuck out of the top of Wild Bill's workshop, where he was undoubtedly tinkering with a metal forge, clanking red-hot iron with a small mallet, a tobacco pipe hanging from his lower lip and a green beret set askew on the top of his graying head. We thought he resembled a renegade Bilbo Baggins, the adopted uncle of all the neighborhood kids reincarnated from our favorite story, from which he read to us in his cabin as we chewed home-made sourdough pretzels by the fire. Another trail of smoke seeped from the top of his tepee, which he lived in a few months of the year, though he had a perfectly functional house. From where I sat with my mother, I could also see Penny's rusted mailbox, felled and flattened by the side of the road, left there in protest against the man who'd run out on her or as a reminder of him and how she would never take him back again. Brightly colored azaleas bloomed around its metal carcass, growing up and around its remaining parts, demanding that passersby take note of its irony. A little farther in the distance, a blue tarp extended from the front of Earl's trailer, rigged up on steel poles staked into the ground. the trailer's door hung wide open.

Excerpted from Riverine by Angela Palm. Copyright © 2016 by Angela Palm. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.