Christianne Balk is the author of Desiring Flight (Purdue UP) and Bindweed (Macmillan), which was awarded the Walt Whitman Award for 1985. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, the Atlantic, Harper's, Willow Springs, and Alaska Quarterly Review.

By drawing our attention to what we may, at first, be tempted to overlook, the author surprises us by relating it to something else which is not obviously related, but which, by virtue of her keen perceptions, shows itself to be attached, sometimes emotionally, sometimes morally, often mysteriously. Christianne Balk writes about land, landscape, wind, rock, bird, plant and animal, river and ocean as if to record as well as to protect. At the center of her work is a profound reverence for the scaffolding of the earth itself, a willingness to embrace the continual cycles of disintegration and growth we are all part of.