A Field Guide to the Subterranean

Finalist for the Oregon Book Award
Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Award

“A dreamy mixture of memoir, natural history, and environmental worries.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Simultaneously a haunting memoir and an insightful look at society that mimics the fractured sense of a young man finding his way in a confusing world.” —Shelf Awareness

“Justin Hocking is a wizard who crafts his stories with equal measures of passion, poetry, and erudition. His writing voice makes you want to follow him to the end of the Earth, or into its deepest caverns, so that he can show you all the beautiful and amazing things to be found there.” —Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls

“A Field Guide to the Subterranean digs deeply down into the earth with powerful questions about who we are and what we’ve made with our time on the planet. Justin Hocking has created a profound geological journey of the soul, unearthing wisdom about masculinity, the colonization of land and people, and the possibility that we might recover our own hearts if we are willing to be in intimate relationship to the non-human world. A geo love song.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves

“This book is a marvel of excavation into the stories we tell about land and self. I devoured it in a day, and emerged seeing the world with both more glitter and more shadow, Hocking’s luminous, lyrical voice echoing in my ear. Reading A Field Guide to the Subterranean somehow feels both like going on a round-the-world adventure and curling up on the couch to converse with an old friend.” —Erica Berry, author of Wolfish