Reviews
The River You Touch
“Explores what it takes to live a meaningful life in a rapidly changing environment. Dombrowski’s work offers a fresh take on Montana, not just as a playground for sport but as a nurturing home.” – Debra Magpie Earling, The New York Times
“A poignant rumination on marriage, parenthood, friendship and what it means to connect with nature.” – Jeff Zillgitt. USA Today
“Every sentence of this book sings.” – Nick Triolo, Outside Magazine
“The River You Touch is an excellent memoir about family, fatherhood and fishing from the wordsmith, Chris Dombrowski.” – Monte Burke, Forbes
“There’s enjoying nature, and then there’s the ability to write well about it. The River You Touch is a love song that readers with the same musical taste are sure to admire.”
– Minneapolis Star Tribune
"In prose you could sharpen a knife on, Dombrowski has followed his masterful Body of Water with a brilliant memoir. I can't do justice to a book as perfect in tone as this, so generous in pace and written with the inviting but dangerous intensity of rivers."
– Christopher Camuto, Gray’s Sporting Journal
“A sparkling, passionate ode . . . Dombrowski opens doors to his work and life. Pass through any and it’s unlikely you’ll emerge unchanged.” – Shelf Awareness, **starred**
“A beautifully and poignantly written tribute to a beloved landscape and its spirit.” – Kirkus Reviews, **starred**
"Will change the way people see the world." – Yvonne Conza, BOMB Magazine
“A treasure of a memoir.” – Bill Bryant, Inlander
"Dombrowski writes with fresh sensitivity. Chronicles the possibilities for an artistic, healthy, balanced, family-integrated existence…recognizing that 'there is nothing as wild and vital' as a child’s company."– Henry Hughes, Harvard Review
“Revels in the wilderness of parenthood and western Montana, traversing discovery and wonder with the deftness of a wolf crossing a stream.” – Noah Davis, Brevity
“A personal guide like no other . . . lyrical, visually rich, packed with thought-provoking narrative that may guide you to being a better human.” – Jennifer Bisbing, Montana Quarterly
“Buy this book for yourself. And another for any friend who seeks to live a mindful and creative life in the throes of responsibility to family, self, community and a little plot of land on the planet.” – Contemplify
“With lyrical language and vivid color, the book becomes more than a memoir – it serves as a guidebook to a life of authenticity and connection.” – Marc Beaudin, Big Sky Journal
“Eloquent . . . [Dombrowski] captures the seasons of this singular, wild country.”
– Taos News
“Lyrical and complex.” – Aurora Bonner, Hippocampus Magazine
"An intimate collection…a complex, candid meditation on parenting, fishing, writing, and living in a manner that will stir the blood and fire the intellect." – Booklist
“Exquisite work. Punctuated by the frank candor of a writer weighing sacrifice and art, this introspective memoir will hook fans of A River Runs Through It.” – Publishers Weekly
“In slow, eddying prose, [The River You Touch] mines an ordinary life for evocative reflections on family, friendship, and the meaning found in a rugged landscape.” – Foreword Reviews, **starred**
Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish
“A lyrical, genre-defying tribute. Drawing on Caribbean history and the evolution of fly-fishing, Dombrowski’s foray into nonfiction proves thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming.” – Publishers Weekly **starred review**
“There’s a tremendous amount of information here on the geological, botanical, biological and human history of the region, but the author uses only what’s necessary to the story and relates it in evocative, concise language that reminded me of Gary Snyder one minute and John McPhee the next. In this way we get an effortless sense of place … [made me] wish that more fishing books were written by poets.” –Wall Street Journal
“Delightfully elegant…In waters frequented by literary greats like Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey, Dombrowski is in heady company tackling this subject, but proves himself more than up to the challenge…This is the stuff of men and boats and saltwater and meditations on what it means to take the sea in search of one great catch. Have no doubt—fishing literature has a new star.” – Booklist
“Dombrowski elevates the fly-fishing-as-meditation narrative by the sheer fact that he’s so damn good at writing about it…A book worth reading whether or not bonefish excite you.”
– Outside
“This is some of the best writing that you’ll ever read about fishing. But Body of Water achieves even more—it’s a passionate, luminous, completely delightful book.”
– Ian Frazier
“Pours forth beauties, subtleties, dark history and insight with an unforced lyrical power I associate with no lesser word than ‘masterpiece.’ … I’ve read no book anything like Body of Water, and enjoyed no book in memory more.” – David James Duncan
“An immersion, a baptism…Dombrowski brings an auteur’s sensibility to framing (the history of bonefishing and its most essential guide)…A philosophical exploration that elevates (the story) into a spiritual memoir in the tradition of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” – Orion
“A wonderful book. An evocation of the why not the how in angling.” – Forbes
“A gifted storyteller...Dombrowski’s talent is on full display here, his tight and rhythmic prose reminding one of the gentle and relaxing lap of water against the hull of a fishing boat on a sunny and windless day.” – American Booksellers Association
“The lyrical narrative (about ecosystem exploitation, class conflict, wealth inequity, race relations, and nature as the catalyst for self-awareness) strikes a delicate balance between reflective memoir and reportage. To the author, fishing demands (more than) attention, patience, wonder and balance. It is praying.” – Minnesota Star-Tribune
"Like an updated version of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ (Body of Water is) a cautionary tale, but rarely do cautionary tales dazzle like this…a credit to Dombrowski’s prose, which torques and twists and glistens into view much like the bonefish itself….a book about seeking that which we cannot see, of understanding a place and its people not nearly as foreign as we might imagine. (The reader is left) with many lessons, though this one most of all: whether on a skiff or in a book, the guide matters. And Dombrowski’s the one you want." – Los Angeles Review
“Brings to life the remarkable natural beauty of the bonefish flats and their flora and fauna…The portrayal of (this) complex ecosystem left me with deep concern for how much longer this treasure will last in the face of global pressures on our oceans and environment”
– Bloomberg (a 2016 Best Book)
“Chris Dombrowski is…a wonderful storyteller….His passion for life and his curiosity about the natural world are apparent on every page. Writing this beautiful is as rare as the elusive bonefish he so diligently pursues.” – Powells.com (a Powell’s Pick)
“A superbly cast work of nonfiction that deserves a wide readership. The sheer line speed of Chris Dombrowski’s prose is a joy to watch unfold. At ever turn he brings precision and originality to his sparkling depiction of flats fishing in sentences that would make Tom McGuane lean back in the batter’s box. (An) extraordinary book. – Gray’s Sporting Journal
“As captivating and eye-opening as McGuane’s The Longest Silence. (Generations) of angler-readers have been reared on writers like McGuane and Duncan, as well as older masters like Hemingway and Maclean. The next generation will have a new writer on their shelves: Chris Dombrowski.” – The Drake, John Larison
“A mythic journey. If you have fished, or wanted to fish, or just stepped out of doors with some expectancy, (this) is the book for you. The Buddha said “days spent fishing do not count against one’s allotted days. Body of Water tells us why.” – Michigan Public Radio
“…flashes of Melville…keen, enthusiastic observations; reflections on fishing and life that shift with the changing tides and angles of light; prose presented with delicacy, power and skill; and raptures so vividly grounded in tropic details that the reader will share a four-sense tableau of being ‘there’. – Fly Rod and Reel
“(Body of Water) quests to tell a fundamental story of integrity in the face of overwhelming odds, (exploring) the ironies and big questions of life. Gorgeously written…this book (is) tender, poignant, funny, and very well worth the effort.” – Big Sky Journal (a 2016 Best Book)
“A beautifully rendered travelogue/memoir (that) adeptly shifts focus between a microscopic fascination with the natural world and the vast forms of racial oppression, conservation and ecotourism. Body of Water flawlessly realizes this world of allure and destruction.”
– High Desert Journal
“Even those who have never cast for a fish or laid eyes on the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean will finish Body of Water with a sense of awe and wonder and a commitment toward the conservation of our imperiled planet.”– Steamboat Pilot and Today
“Reflections on water, the allure of fishing and its dark history….make this book great. In the last chapters…I pulled out the pen and began underlining and making notations. I started to bend pages and annotate moving passages, telltale signs of falling in love with a book.” – The Missoulian
“Share any of its author’s fascinations and Body of Water is likely to become a favorite. Listing those fascinations is tough—but among them are water….the ravishing scent of a perfect phrase in perfect bloom, (and) the human mind ennobled by its attempts to reconcile the unknowable.” – Missoula Independent
“Dombrowski explores the zen-like balance he experiences while bonefishing and makes a good case that out on a skiff in the Bahama flats ‘we enter the prayerful closet of the senses and close the door.’ Fly-fishing mysticism at its best.” – Shelf-Awareness
Ragged Anthem
“Dombrowski … stretches language to its limits in describing the natural world.”
– Publishers Weekly
“There’s a gritty, Keatsian embrace of the mysteries that swirl through these pages and imbue the material world with ethereal qualities. Dombrowski’s first two books of poetry received some deserved attention, but this one, his best yet, makes a strong case for the importance of his voice in American poetry. It startles as it deepens and widens us.” – Derek Sheffield, Terrain.org
“It’s America the Beautiful with a bad case of the blues, and hasn’t it always been? Everything that has been torn open and exposed in this current America has been here right from the very start. Dombrowski pulls the shock and disappointment and love into sharp focus…These wonderful poems ask why, and how durable we might be, faced with so much trouble.” – Dean Kuipers, Los Angeles Review of Books, reprinted at The Poetry Foundation
“Like a Bitterroot Mountain Moses, the poet has come down from the mountains and written a series of commands on a tablet. But rather than a collection of prohibitions, Dombrowski encourages his reader to embrace the sumptuous bounty of this world.”
– Noah Davis, Indiana Review
“A soulful book of longing that is as comic as it is reflective. These poems sing of humankind in need of something it can only seem to get from the natural world … (and) make for discovery that approaches the magic of revelation.” – Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Tradition
“(These) magnificent poems showcase a numinous adoration of the beautiful and strange. From exquisitely reverential renderings of the natural world to the twinned experiences of love and loss, this is a superb collection, one to be savored.” – Alex Lemon, author of Feverland: A Memoir in Shards
“Reading Ragged Anthem is like staring at the sun and then looking away. Whatever is seen next is informed and haunted by that light. Dombrowski’s poems are that clear, that powerful. This book will change you.” – Kevin Goodan, author of Anaphora
“Here, Dombrowski quotes Roethke, another Michigan treasure: ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see,’ and indeed these poems see the turmoil and resilient beauty of contemporary America, from ‘rivers strewn with moonlight and discarded / shopping carts’ to ‘boulder-curled cataracts / pocked by sewers.’ Even weeping, here, is the beginning of the ragged anthem we desperately need.” – Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
“Dombrowski reminds us with the clarity of a mountain stream why poems matter.”
– Melissa Kwasny, author of The Cloud Path
“Chris Dombrowski has proven himself to be among the best poets of his generation.”
– Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory
“A definite flowering in the American grain.” – Dorianne Laux, author of Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems
Earth Again
“I read and reread these urgent, burning poems, I found myself underlining and starring and scribbling down not only kneebuckling images and turns of phrase, but commandments and questions to live by. I wept reading this book. I was wrecked reading this…a holy book.”
– Joe Wilkins, Orion
“Not just for nature lovers, Earth Again is one of the most beautiful books of poetry I have read in years. Musically, deftly, sharply, it deals with birth, sex, death, and so much in between, with a light touch that includes comedy, fantasy, satire, somehow magically in the service of deep meaning, deep feeling. Dombrowski is heir to Galway Kinnell, writing of the everyday–unforgettably.” – Alicia Ostriker
Earth Again is an arresting, beautiful collection of poems. Chris Dombrowski is musical and intellectual in equal measure, and the poems here are memorable in every way—surprising and strange, moving and alarming, delightful and frightening. This is important new work.”
– Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
“Chris Dombrowski descends from the best of our nature poets: John Haines, Jeffers and Wordsworth. Earth Again is a lovely, lovely book.” – Dorianne Laux
“Memory should not be called knowledge, Keats wrote, and yet in Chris Dombrowski’s patient hands, the memory of the natural world is knowledge indeed….This is a generous, clear-eyed, lyricism. The wisdom of one who sees a flying object and says it could be a helicopter or archangel. Beautiful poems.” – Ilya Kaminsky
“…Dombrowski apprentices himself, again and again, to feeling the earth precisely, whether glorying or grieving, or caught in their impassable coincidence. I am wowed by his courage and his care. Nothing escapes his scrutiny, least of all the medium of his own imperfect heart. EARTH AGAIN. We are here to be schooled, to be shaken from our grossest, and even our smallest forms of negligence. Dombrowski is a poet of conscience. A river-guide in every sense. A psalmist overcoming a cynic. We are fortunate, I think, to have this kind of poet still among us.” – Sarah Gridley
“Chris Dombrowski’s new book, Earth Again, is extraordinarily powerful and graceful.”
– Jim Harrison
“In Earth Again, Chris Dombrowski taps into our collective fears about the future of the planet and the ways in which we can and cannot connect as humans with the natural world. The magnificence of Earth Again is that every poem seems to emerge from the very dirt, the very ground on which Dombrowski walks. Unlike many collections these days, which muse on nature and ecology from a great remove, this book gives us a speaker unafraid to sing to us from the middle of the woods, his hands covered in the stuff of this world he loves.”
– James Crews, Prairie Schooner
“…it can be argued that Missoula hasn’t had a transcendent poet of place since the immortal Richard Hugo passed away in 1982. That may be changing. Chris Dombrowski, a Michigan-born poet who fell in love with Missoula upon moving here in 1999, has just released Earth Again, his second full-length book of poetry… a stunning work, rife with gorgeous images of Western lives and landscapes, imbued with a hardscrabble perception that will be instantly recognized by those who have committed their lives and families to this most demanding of paradises.” – Nick Davis, Missoula Independent
“This is a full spectrum collection – complete in color, tone, speed, and emotion. As vibrant as fresh blood on snow, as soft as a pine forest floor under foot, as loving as body heat on a cold night, Dombrowski’s poems gather the earth’s beauty, wicked or otherwise and binds that beauty with words strong enough to hold it together.” – Foster Neil, Michigan Poet
by cold water
"By Cold Water is a wonderful book of poems. I read it several times utterly engrossed in its natural imagery, the grace in which the process of revelation tells us what we didn’t know, describes what we never noticed. Dombrowski is a fine poet. I could have said that he’s a fine young poet because he’s only thirty-three but in truth he’s a thousand years old like any fine poet.” – Jim Harrison
“Intimates of wasp nests and barbed wire, of mountains’ minerality and the light sequestered inside a horse’s mane, Chris Dombrowski’s poems word the world-and their reader-into largeness, with specificity, tenderness, and passion.” – Jane Hirshfield
“Language enfolding around language, punctuation cast aside, and the watering mouth of our ear and tongue wagging after such beauty: this is the poetic terrain of a young poet whose work holds so much promise (and so much of it already fulfilled in this wonderful book).” – Green Mountains Review
As we say of a car, it has clean lines; or of an ant’s eyes that they are closely engaged; the way we exclaim of an image that it bridges stars, Chris Dombrowski’s poems ennoble their page.”
– William Gass, Two-Time National Book Critics Award Winner
“Dombrowski, in (this) exciting first full-length volume, seems to work from a loose, ancient, explosive formula: poem = dream = vision = song = prophecy = myth. (His) work draws on primal sources of energy and music….and suggest(s) that if anything can save the forsaken world, it may be visionary song.” – Neo
“To stand upright and see the eye ascend: this is Dombrowski’s core proposal. In By Cold Water location beautifully becomes both virtue and task of virtue. These poems are truly afoot with their vision, and I welcome them.” – Donald Revell