Llano Estacado.

An Island in the Sky (Voice in the American West).

Edited by Stephen Bogener. Photographs by Peter Brown, Rick Dingus, Steve Fitch, Miguel Gandert, Tony Gleaton & Andrew John Liccardo.

Texas Tech University Press, 2011. 192 pp., illustrated throughout, 12½x11¼".

The Llano Estacado, Coronado's legendary "staked plains," comprises all or part of thirty-three counties in Texas and four in New Mexico. This enormous island of grass covers approximately 32,000 square miles of arid prairie used primarily today for ranching and farming. It lies atop the vast Ogalalla Aquifer-its primary source of water-and partially covers the oil-bearing Permian Basin. Its population, outside of four mid-sized cities, is sparse.

The Llano has always required and appealed to discerning eyes. The artists and writers gathered here are hardly the first to have felt the pull of this place or the urgency to capture its essence. Yet the idiosyncrasies and ideals, the successes and failures, the strangeness and beauty and power of the land and its people beckon fresh discovery. Look at the Llano with eyes open to possibility, and you will encounter the unexpected, a keener understanding of the ways in which landscape and life are always inescapably intertwined, thrumming, as Barry Lopez suggests, the eternal questions: Where are we? And where do we go from here?

Steve Fitch is represented by photo-eye Gallery. See his work here.

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