Cover art by Neil C. Johannsen | Photograph by Benjamin Drummond
Swimming With Snakes
by Robert Michael Pyle
In his thirtieth book—and fifth poetry collection—beloved naturalist and writer Robert Michael Pyle returns with poems and prose that wriggle, shimmer, and sing. Swimming with Snakes is full of the vitality, humor, reverence, and wisdom that mark Pyle’s decades-long devotion to the wild and near-at-hand.
From slugs and thrushes to human intimacy and planetary grief, these pages celebrate both the transcendent and the tangible. With an eye trained by science and a voice honed by wonder, Pyle maps a terrain where butterflies, memories, and snakes in swimming pools co-exist with quiet heartbreak and delight.
Pyle writes:
My only hopes for Swimming with Snakes are to sweeten your life a little with the tellings, and to encourage your own close attention to and care of the other ones we are so privileged to live among.
Date of Publication: July 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9991654-2-8
Pages: 138
Size: 6” x 9”
Price: $25.00 (price includes shipping in the Continental USA)
Order Information Coming Soon!
If you are interested in reserving a copy, please reach out using our Contact Form.
Excerpt
An excerpt from “Black Valentines”
Like each other’s shadows, like an object and its reflection in a pool of ink, like a Rorschach test for a gentled mind, the two lie bonded. Like obsidian chips from an arrowhead’s face, like paired punctuation marks inscribed on the tablet of the mountain’s stone, like black valentines, they repose, Erebia’s wings enfolded between those of the larger female, her tip embraced by his body’s clasp. Such is butterfly love.
And so they remain throughout the long mountain night, for a storm arises and sends them understone for shelter, still paired.
About Robert Michael Pyle
Yale-trained ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has been writing essay, poetry, fiction, and natural history in Cascadia for sixty years. His books include the Northwest classics Wintergreen, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Sky Time in Gray's River; the acclaimed novel Magdalena Mountain; and a flight of butterfly books including Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest. They have won the John Burroughs Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Washington Book Awards, two National Outdoor Book Awards, and Nature Matrix was finalist for the 2021 PEN America Award for the Art of the Essay. Swimming with Snakes is his fifth full collection of poems and his thirtieth book.
Advance Praise for Swimming With Snakes
Already a literary luminary and nature writing eminence, Robert Michael Pyle is far from done. His latest collection, Swimming with Snakes, finds him as fun and spunky, as curious and learned, as wise and tender as ever—and, if possible, even more deeply in love with the natural world. I go to Robert Michael Pyle’s work to begin to understand how we might live more carefully and joyfully with thrushes, slugs, and butterflies, with the self and with the beloved, with all our many neighbors.
—Joe Wilkins, resident of the Coast Range in Oregon, is the author of the novels The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die. His latest collection of poetry is Pastoral, 1994.
It’s so refreshing to read these poems and prose texts of a man who speaks off the page as he does in life—full of natural vitality and humor, homespun in his stories, with an offhand, yet almost Adamic reverence for the natural world and all its denizens. For Pyle’s world is alive with beings, each sentient as the Buddha, and what we get from his book is a sweet man’s testimony from a lifetime of intimate, often playful but sometimes sad experiences with a myriad of earthly creatures and their transcendental spirits. He’s a wrangler, all right, but he wrestles with flocks, herds, and colonies of angels.
—Garrett Hongo, Award winning poet, Distinguished Professor, Program in Creative Writing, University of Oregon and author, most recently, of Ocean of Clouds.