A visceral new collection from esteemed poet Stephan Torre, grappling with the strength and complexities of life in the northwest wild lands. Drawing from a life lived well, amidst hard work and time for reflection in the northwest wild lands of the Canadian and American Wests, Stephan Torre returns to the literary world with his usual descriptive and lyric intensity. Comprised of new and selected poems, Red Obsidian explores the necessary tensions that arise between genders and the pain and grief of environmental loss. Inspired and influenced by a diverse array of literary influences-Indigenous oral poets and English pastoral poets, T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets and Latin American poets, American Imagists and poets Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin-Torre's book is a poetic journal of a man passionately engaged at once with the marvel of wilderness and the rural labours of family homesteading, construction, and the logging of that wilderness. "When there's more joy or grief or hunger for knowing than I could express or explore elsewhere, I'm afflicted with the need to squeeze language from my fists. One can only hold so much inside," admits Torre. Readers will feel the torque, squeeze, and pull in these poems.

This volume addresses foundational issues concerning the nature of first-personal, or de se, thought and how such thoughts are communicated. One of the questions addressed is whether there is anything distinctive about first-person thought or whether it can be subsumed under broader phenomena. Many have held that first-person thought motivates a revision of traditional accounts of content or motivates positing special ways of accessing such contents. Gottlob Frege famously held that first-person thoughts involve a subject being 'presented to himself in a particular and primitive way, in which he is presented to no-one else.' However, as Frege also noted, this raises many puzzling questions when we consider how we are able to communicate such thoughts. Is there indeed something special about first-person thought such that it requires a primitive mode of presentation that cannot be grasped by others? If there really is something special about first-person thought, what happens when I communicate this thought to you? Do you come to believe the very thing that I believe? Or is my first-person belief only entertained by me? If it is only entertained by me, how does it relate to what you come to believe? It is these questions that the volume addresses and seeks to answer.