South × South

Charles Hood's journeys have taken him from the high Arctic to Patagonia, Easter Island, and the South Pole. He has been a dishwasher, a ski instructor, and a nature guide in Africa.His previous books include Bombing Ploesti and Río de Dios from Red Hen Press, as well as Xopilote Cantos and The Half-Life of Salt: Voices from the Enola Gay. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, an Artist in Residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation. Charles Hood teaches photography and writing at Antelope Valley College, California.

"When so much of the imagination has been domesticated, it's refreshing to be reminded that even when all the frontiers are gone there will still be places that remain strange, difficult, and mostly empty. And when we get there, we'll still be our uneasily astonished, loveable, ridiculous selves." "Only in recent years has poetry of Antarctica moved definitively beyond the heroics to deal with how the continent radically reorders perceptions of self and world. Werner Herzog's film Encounters at the End of the World was a step in that direction, and now Charles Hood has pushed forward even further with a voice that connects us all irrevocably with the most otherworldly part of our own planet."