Reciting an excerpt from his poem, “Fifty-Eight Faces of California Spring,” Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator Forrest Gander travels through California’s many counties to offer a geologic atlas of this vast region in spring. Speaking the language of rock—alluvium, quartzite, sandstone, jasper—these field notes give a glimpse of the cycles that continually play out amid apparent stillness, the always-present change hidden in the swathe of deep time.

Read the full poem.

Discover our latest print edition, Volume 6: Seasons.

Credit: Ryan Molnar / Connected Archives