Chris Dombrowski is the author of the memoir Body of Water (Milkweed Editions), a Bloomberg News Best Book of 2016, as well as three full length collections of poetry, most recently Ragged Anthem (WSUP, 2019). His poems have appeared in over a hundred anthologies and journals including Guernica, Gulf Coast, Orion, Poetry, Terrain.org, and The Southern Review. For the better part of two decades, he has taught creative writing to a vast array of age groups, most recently as the William Kittredge Visiting Writer-in-Residence in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula, where he guides the rivers, directs the Beargrass Writing Workshops, and makes his home with his loveably feral family.
Chris Dombrowski

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Begin, O Small Boy, to be Born
This piece is excerpted from The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water by Chris Dombrowski. The manifold radiance of an expectant mother: hips widened to the hilt, abrupt, Continue reading
Poetry
Boy with Tree Frog
He caught the singer in his hands before it sang, slick, jumping-like-a-pulse thing in the small cave his palms made, pliable, bird-boned, blinking other before it could join the bark-hugging horde Continue reading
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On the Shelf: Chris Dombrowski
The week’s recommended reading and culture from Orion authors and artists. While fishing last night sometime between two and three a.m., I heard a great horned owl call from a riverbank Continue reading
Poetry
Possible Psalm
When I saw light the sculptor chiseling sheer bluff from slope — the punk wood landing as shadow in down-mountain saddles, a coarse grit teasing out the basalt’s facelike features, then Continue reading
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Chris Dombrowski’s Bookshelf
As a reader, I’m quite the dabbler — a bite of this washed down with that — and so the length of the list below is due in large part to Continue reading
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Kana
Submit your own haiku in the discussion area. TO REACH THE HONEY HOLE I have to cross a channel of knee-high, silt-stained river with twenty-month-old Luka, my mushroom-picking partner, on my Continue reading
Poetry
Wedding Poem (Epithalamium)
Like the hair she has waited all day to let down, a shadow unfurls from the Ponderosa’s trunk: a plank one might walk to horizon’s edge, the dark band just stops. Continue reading