Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn to the majesty, intelligence, and range of emotion of a single pod of embattled orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Both an elegy for a small group of orcas and a celebration of the entire species, this book is a moving portrait of the interconnectedness of humans and marine mammals - and of the responsibility we have to protect them.

After a devastating diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, biologist and poet Eva Saulitis found herself gripped by a long-buried childhood urge to pray.  Finding little solace in the rote “from the fox-hole please Gods� arising unbidden in her head, she set herself the task of examining the impulse itself, waking every morning in darkness to write poems, driven on by the questions: What is prayer? What am I praying to? What am I praying for? Who is listening? Each day’s poem proposed a new and surprising answer as, over two years, she traced the questions back to her origins, her Latvian roots, her peasant grandmother, her war-haunted father, her secret-bearing mother, her childhood Catholicism, her obsession with the natural world.  Moving from inward to outward, among radically different geographies (coastal Alaska, Latvia, and Hawaii) and spiritual influences (Catholicism, mysticism, Zen Buddhism) as well as forms, these biologically precise poems range widely in their search.   Unexpectedly, these prayer-poems, forged out of a solitary confrontation with death, take a reader not out of, but deeper into physicality—of the body, the earth, and language itself.  As Saulitis learns, what is most desired is not transcendence, but for as long as possible, “her hands thrust deep in the world.�

After beating breast cancer in her late forties, Eva Saulitis again faces the shadow, knowing this time the result will not end well. Saulitis revels in the nostalgia and secret pleasures that come from knowing it's all fleeting. She searches for answers from European poets and Buddhist scholars, from women in treatment chat rooms, from family, from routine; she looks out into the wilderness, at the salmon dying in the river without the ease of morphine, at stone structures broken from water freezing, expanding inside. Becoming Earth is the account of a woman living life in the presence of death, trying to make sense of a world that will keep going, even though she won't.