Coast Range: A Collection from the Pacific Edge

Finely tuned essays that vary intriguingly in form and tone … Neely capably explores the complexity of his subjects with polish and finesse, looking carefully and thinking deeply. -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

COAST: the edge of land, or conversely the edge of sea. RANGE: a measure between limits, or the scope or territory of a thing.

Coast Range, the debut collection of essays from writer Nick Neely, meticulously and thoughtfully dwells on these intersections and much more. The book’s title refers to the region in which these essays are set: the California and Oregon coastal ranges. In deeply moving prose equal parts exhilarating and pensive, each essay explores an iconic organism (a few geologic), so that, on the whole, the collection becomes a curiosity cabinet that freshly embodies this Pacific Northwest landscape.

But the book also employs a playful range of forms. Just as forest gives way to bluff and ocean, here narrative journalism adjoins memoir and lyric essay. These associative, sensuous, and sometimes saturnine pieces are further entwined by the theme of collecting itself-beginning with a meditation on the impulse to gather beach agates, a semiprecious stone. Another essay follows the journey of salmon from their collection at a hatchery through a casino kitchen to a tribal coming-of-age ceremony; a third is a flitting exploration of hummingbirds. Neely also describes, in vivid detail, his six-month stretch living off the grid along the Rogue River, which ignited his healthy obsession with Oregon. In Coast Range, Neely fashions a kaleidoscope of essays, of which the overarching curiosity is the transient, but finally transcendent, nature of the world we live in.