In The Persephones, American poet Nathaniel Tarn (born 1928) and American photographer Joan Myers (born 1941) offer an elegant, collaborative retelling of Persephone's abduction into the underworld. Many of Myers' images were shot at the sites from which the myth originated. Edition of 500 copies.

In low places consequences collect, and in all North America you cannot get much lower than the Imperial Valley of southern California, where one town, 186 feet below sea level, calls itself the Lowest Down City in the Western Hemisphere, and where the waters of the Colorado River sustain a billion-dollar agricultural industry. The consequences of that industry drain from the valley into the accidentally man-made Salton Sea, Californias largest lake and a vital stopping place for migratory waterfowl. Today the Salton Sea is in desperate environmental trouble.

A second river also ends in the Salton Sea. It is a river of dreams, the remains of which may be seen in the failed real estate developments that sprawl beside the sea. As the ending point of both the real Colorado and this river of dreams, the Salton Sea has become emblematic of much of the history of the American West. Its troubling story is masterfully told here in William deBuyss narrative and Joan Myerss austerely beautiful photographs.

The story of Southern California is fundamentally a story about the control of nature. Beginning with the Yuman-speaking tribes encountered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, deBuys traces the subsequent exploration and development of the region through the Gold Rush of 1849, the government-sponsored surveys that followed, and the inept tinkering with the river by an assortment of irrigation and development interests that resulted in the floods that formed the Salton Sea nearly a century ago. He introduces us to a gallery of rogues and dreamers who saw a great future for this arid wilderness but could never refrain from interference with the forces of nature.

The floods thatproduced the Salton Sea created a vast desert oasis, but the agricultural exploitation of the region, combined with evaporation, poisoned that paradise. The stark beauty of the desert, the engineering feats that have transformed the landscape, and the eerie spectacle of Salton City and its ruined beaches and abandoned yacht club are the subject of Myerss photographs, made over a period of more than ten years. In the last section of "Salt Dreams," deBuys acquaints us with the human and avian denizens of the region, all struggling for survival as the twentieth century draws to a close. The history of chicanery and greed recounted in deBuyss narrative and his empathy with the desert dwellers he and Myers have come to knowhardworking laborers and entrepreneurs who live on both sides of the Mexicali border, eccentrics hiding out in the Salton Desert, pelicans dying of avian botulismare crucial to an understanding of the border issues of today and the impassioned environmental debate on whetherand howto save the Salton Sea.

http: //www.joanmyers.com/Saltbk.htm

Through the miracle of photography and the beholding eye of a master photographer such as Myers, we are able to experience the land and life in India's last remaining wild jungles. This is the land of the tiger and elephant and monkey and rhino and a treasure trove of other species. But, as noted writer William deBuys shares in his provocative essay, poaching is a persistent and pervasive problem, and the natural habitat for wild animals is shrinking at an alarming rate due to expanding development and industrialization. Tigers, for example, are now extinct in ninety-three percent of their historical range worldwide, and, without wildlife refuges such as Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Karizanga, and others in India, their numbers would plummet further.Few citizens of the world will ever experience firsthand the jungles and wild places of India, but in Myers's visual discovery they can witness the excitement and energy of coming upon wild game in a moment's notice and experiencing religious shrines and rural life in nearby villages that seem to blend in effortlessly with the adjacent wilderness."The Jungle at the Door" is that rare glimpse into another world, a world that depends not only on human awareness of what is lost when the jungle is gone, but also the courage and foresight to preserve remaining wild places everywhere, from those in India to our own home ground.(See the publisher's website for further information on the book: http: //gftbooks.com/books_MyersJoan.html )

Walt Cassidy (b. 1972) is a multimedia artist and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout the 1990s, as Waltpaper, he was at the center of the New York City Club Kids movement. In 2014, Walt Cassidy Studio was established as a jewelry brand and has expanded to include interiors-based murals. Cassidy's explorative and allegorical work incorporates photography, drawing, sculpture, painting, and jewelry, and has been exhibited at MASS MOCA, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Deitch Projects, 303 Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Watermill Center, Miami Basel Art Fair, Leslie- Lohman Museum, and Invisible Exports. Publications include Vogue, Elle, Artforum, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and others.

Photographer Joan Myers (born 1944) is perhaps best known for her recent images of the forbidding Antarctic landscape. In this new publication, Myers turns her attention to volcanoes, photographing iconic sites from around the world: Volcano National Park on the island of Hawaii, Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Ecuador's Cotopaxi and Picincha, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, Krakatoa in Indonesia, Mt. Etna and Pompeii are all included in this breathtaking volume. Myers' essay reads like an adventure story, exploring the connection between fire and ice while describing her thrilling treks to the ends of the Earth. We like to imagine Earth as a ball, she writes, a brightly-colored dime-store globe with countries and oceans drawn on its glossy surface. We forget that its surface slides, subducts and transforms, setting off earthquakes and volcanic eruptions ... A stable earth, whatever we would like to think, is an illusion.