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

the laws of thermodynamics, I would learn, deal with the concept of entropy—a measure of a system's disorder and uncertainty. Entropy cannot decrease within any isolated system. It only shifts, like all matter, changing shape and colliding with itself. Diluting, diffusing, evaporating, and folding back onto itself. In our perfect history, junk particles from the big bang eventually become Lake Michigan, the Sahara, a field of tulips in Holland. What wonder is the order in disorder. What beauty. What certainty. A more specific definition of entropy considers the energy within the closed thermodynamic system. this energy serves as a yardstick for the disorder, where entropy is directly proportional to the energy's heat and inversely proportional to its temperature. In our closed system, the river was the heat and the water table was the thermometer. It was a system that seemed desperate to break the boundaries of physics.

"We live in the middle?" I asked my mother.

"Technically," she said. "Our address is in one town, and our phone number is in the other. Pay taxes to one, and go to school in the other. It's like not living in either town. Or like living in both at once."

"So nobody wants us."

I looked around, stunned by my new perspective. Most of what I saw was familiar—driveways and houses I'd seen before. these were signs of home, but I felt spat out like bad milk. And yet, I was looking at it in a new way—seeing it for the first time with the scrutiny of a stranger. It occurred to me then that this part of the map was unlike either of the pink-dotted towns. Children I went to school with did not live like us, shooting handmade weapons into the woods and wearing deerskin costumes. they were not learning Morse code or the words to Revolutionary War folk songs.

Soldier, soldier won't you marry me,
With your musket, fife and drum?
Oh, no, sweet maid I cannot marry ye,
For I have no coat to put on.

In the songs we sang, I always pictured myself as the girl waiting to be married off to a soldier or a carpenter or a sailor like some certain destiny, packaged, but unaddressed, for a future delivery date. When I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never knew how to answer. "What do you think I should be?" I would reply.


When I sketched with charcoal, I anticipated the sensation of blurring the crisp black lines into something softer, more fluid and wet-washed. When I painted with watercolors, I most often favored textures that were salt spattered or misted with water. I was engaged in an ongoing corruption of medium, and every undertaking was an exercise in thinning and thickening substances of expression until they were perfectly muddled. "Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam," Annie Dillard writes in Holy the Firm.Dillard has an intimate relationship with land that shifts, with water that rises around people who can only watch and try to understand what they're seeing. Fringe investigation was the science of my neighborhood and of my art.

Along the banks of the Kankakee, where water met the land and foam blurred the line between solid and liquid states, Wild Bill lived in a tepee. But why?I wondered. And from that why, other whys flowed. Why did the ice cream truck driver look relieved when we shrugged our shoulders as he drove by? Why had the river been moved? Why had anyone built a whole neighborhood in an old riverbed that flooded half the time and stunk like rot and heat all the time? More important, why did they stay there? Why did some people seem a part of the land more than others, more entwined with it?

Filled with this new view, I knew that I was neither sort, but instead some half-breed spawn of both worlds and alien to both. A bookish fishergirl who longed for the social opportunities of a cookie-cutter subdivision. When I looked more closely, I saw that Penny's mailbox might well have been blue at one time. One day in the distant past, Penny and her man had bought a little house with a nice blue mailbox. They had planted flowers that emerged newly green from the soil each April. Once, hope had filled the emptied valley of the river's bends.

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.