Staff Pick
Chris Dombrowski is a poet, a fly-fishing guide, and a wonderful storyteller. In Body of Water he sets out to understand the origins of saltwater fly-fishing and to get to know the guide who helped establish the sport in the Bahamas. Dombrowski's passion for life and his curiosity about the natural world are apparent on every page. Writing this beautiful is as rare as the elusive bonefish he so diligently pursues. Recommended By Shawn D., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions — poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight to Miami.
Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it.
By the time Dombrowski meets Pinder, however, he has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinder’s stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guide’s life.
Review
"Dombrowski has inadvertently written the ultimate guide on how to pursue and capture your life’s passion. Uncanny and moving. This book will not only make you change your vacation plans, it might make you change your life. A reverent, almost holy book, of angling lore." Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red
Review
"Body of Water hits you in two ways. The first is obvious — this is a book about fish and fishing from a writer who's put in the time to know what he's talking about. But the second takes you by surprise: at its core, Body of Water is about our increasingly tenuous connection to nature, from a poet who understands the source of that strange and melancholic joy that we are blessed with only when we stand in wild places." Steven Rinella, author of Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter
Review
"Chris Dombrowski has fetched up a marvel. So very much is in it — geology, biology, fishing lore; conservation and natural history and personal quest — all seen by a wondrously limber mind traversing space and time. I don’t fish but this scarcely matters — Body of Water is about being alive. An abundant and reverential feast of a book." Noy Holland, author of Bird
Review
"This gorgeous work wastes not a word on fly-fishing basics. It dives Moby-Dick-deep into a famed sport and livelihood's very essence, and never leaves. In the hands of veteran trout guide and poet Chris Dombrowski, the 'Abraham' of Caribbean guides, David Pinder Sr., becomes the perfect embodiment of the near mystery religion that is saltwater-flats fishing. Via the hearts of two men utterly in love with the wounded world in which their calling takes place, Body of Water then pours forth beauties, subtleties, dark history, and insight with an unforced lyrical power I associate with no lesser word than 'masterpiece.' Dombrowski's Michigan-to-Montana trajectory updates Jim Harrison, his comedic fishing scenes bear comparison to Thomas McGuane, and his powers of ebullient reflection bring to mind Mary Oliver — yet I’ve read no book anything like Body of Water, and enjoyed no book in memory more." David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
Review
"A lyrical, genre-defying tribute. Drawing on Caribbean history and the evolution of fly-fishing, Dombrowski’s foray into nonfiction proves thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Born in Michigan, Chris Dombrowski earned his MFA from the University of Montana. His publications include two collections of poems, By Cold Water (2009) and Earth Again (2013). His poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in leading journals and magazines. Also a well-established fly-fishing guide, Dombrowski lives in Missoula, Montana.
Body of Water (forthcoming October 2016) is about the journey that lead Dombrowski to the Bahamas; to its most elusive and highly prized creature, the bonefish; and to David Pinder, the legendary fisherman who created an industry. Part fishing hagiography, part ecology, and part elegy, Body of Water is a tribute to a man, a place, and a particularly beguiling fish, written in prose as immersive and crystalline as the waters of the Caribbean itself.