This anthology collects short pieces of nature writing by ninety different women. It's mostly prose, with the odd bit of poetry, and came about after the editor noted that most of the nature writing she read and admired had been written by men, so she started a deliberate search for that written by women. Hence the collection, although it's restricted to writers from the USA. Everything is well-written and compelling, although I note with interest that Mary Oliver refused permission to reprint "Wild Geese" in the anthology as she didn't feel that cataloguing the poem by gender was especially useful. It's one of my favourite poems, so that was a bit of a shame.

I've read a handful of the contributing authors before, including Ursula K. Le Guin and Terry Tempest Williams - I've very much enjoyed their previous work so no surprise that their respective contributions were some of my favourites here. For me, however, there was one piece that stood out from the rest - Annie Dillard's "Living Like Weasels". I made a note of the Dillard collection this essay was in so that I can get a copy of my own one day, because that essay was incredible.

As much as I enjoyed each piece separately, however, there were times when the overall effect came across as a little... glutinous, maybe? I know that nature writing tends towards the slower-paced, but there was nothing here longer than a handful of pages. Even ninety very short pieces shouldn't feel so slow as this, in my experience, but for some reason it did. Perhaps the effect was cumulative. A little more variation in the pacing amongst the individual pieces might have helped there, I think.