In his short fiction, written mostly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Kent Nelson exhibits an extraordinary beauty and fluency of narrative voice. His uncomplicated plotlines unfold with elegance, even in the most rustic settings. Frequently set in the American West and Southwest, his stories also reflect a naturalist's knowledge of bird, plant, and animal life. Yet, as his language swells at key moments into highly lyrical description, Nelson moves well beyond nature writing, creating a poetics of perception through which to rediscover an already inhabited land. So doing, he renders the everyday world oddly strange, yet--in his descriptive precision--hauntingly familiar. This quality of his prose is in part what led W. D. Wetherell to proclaim on the dust jacket of Toward the Sun: The Collected Sports Stories of Kent Nelson (1998) that "Kent Nelson has written . . . as accomplished a body of short fiction as anyone writing...