Mike Burwell’s poetry is hauntingly evocative, palpably conveying his love of the natural world and of Alaska as he navigates his reader on a steady current of powerful images. Burwell’s poems evoke Alaska’s landscapes, and each poem is a thoughtful mapping of the world around him. “Here, in Cartography of Water, the quietude of the untamed, wilder world is kept company by the wilderness of one man’s longing and loud ache. Wolves appear, and bears, and the rusty remnants of old miners’ dreams. . . . Against the beauty and terror of life, the poet holds to words which manage, in turn, to capture and hold up for us some remnant of the brief joys of his world, actual and imagined.”—Anne Caston