The poems in THIS COUNTRY OF GALE-FORCE WINDS present what may at first glance seem in fact to be a multiplicity of countries. Here are poems about the country of our here-and-now: the places we share with our ancestors who built them and with our descendants who will build other places, already dimly foreseen. Here are poems about that country called the family, every family a world unto itself, yet with connections deep in the past and far into the future and with every family everywhere, human, plant, or animal. Here are poems about the countries we build in our minds, unquestionably the strangest and most unfathomable of all worlds, and all the more real because intangible. These poems are also about what our countries have in common: the winds of change that blow endlessly across them, changing their landscapes and the connections among them, and challenging us to keep our footing in this world of the ten thousand countries that are one.