POETRY | AVAILABLE APRIL 2026
THE DIVINATION OF SALMON
Poems
by VIVIAN FAITH PRESCOTT
“The Divination of Salmon captures the urgency and precarious beauty of interconnected migrations and cycles of labor.”
—LAURA DA’, American Book Award winning author of Tributaries
In a remote Alaskan fishcamp, Salmon Woman—a shapeshifting storyteller, scientist, and cultural memory keeper—tells stories by way of poems about the intimate bond between salmon, people, and the place they both call home.
As these poems shimmer, weave, and flow on the page, they capture the rhythms of rural island life and the changes wrought by climate crisis. Salmon are not just sustenance but identity, and as the environment shifts, so does the lifeweb that binds communities to the fish they depend on. Both warning and wonder, The Divination of Salmon honors ancestral knowledge while imagining a future where resilience and connection endure.
Poetry | Trade Paper Original | Trim: 6 x 9” | ISBN: 9798890920379 | $16.95 | April 2026
“Her lines are a tightrope walk between the visceral reality of the catch and kill, and spiritual relationship between the fisher and the catch. It is also a father/daughter story of the man who passed on the way of the salmon and the daughter left behind to carry on the fish camp. These poems...will indeed stand the test of time.”
—CHARLOTTE GLOVER and DAVE KIFFER, Parnassus Books and Gifts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
VIVIAN FAITH PRESCOTT is a bi writer, born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska. Her children and grandchildren are Ravens and belong to the T’akdeintaan clan from GlacierBay. She was adopted into that clan and is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi. Prescott is the author of thirteen books and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a MA in Cross Cultural Studies: Indigenous Knowledge Systems from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She lives and writes as a climate witness in Lingit Aaní at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’héenKwáan.
PRAISE FOR THE DIVINATION OF SALMON
“The Divination of Salmon captures the urgency and precarious beauty of interconnected migrations and cycles of labor. Images glint and refract like fish scales as the poems, “flick salmon scales from our eyelids, remember pink flesh on our tongues.”
—LAURA DA’, American Book Award winning author of Tributaries
“These poems are dynamic, they will survive 'eruptions, landslides, wildfires.' They will indeed stand the test of time.”
—CHARLOTTE GLOVER and DAVE KIFFER, Parnassus Books and Gifts
“I was really moved by the provocations in this book, by the earned and sacred sincerity it
evinces. The Divination of Salmon is a work of witness and wonder, naming both the vanishing
and the enduring. Prescott has written a book that listens as much as it speaks,
carrying memory, ecology, and myth with equal clarity. These poems do not simply describe a
world; they inhabit it, give it back to us alive, urgent, shimmering. This book is news.”
—ALBERTO RÍOS, Every Sound is Not a Wolf
“Prescott as teacher and wise woman speaker, lyrical environmental justice advocate and reminder of our profound connections to the planet. These salmon poems reveal entrails and glisten in the moonlight. They jump and ripple directly into your soul.”
—ANA CASTILLO, My Book of the Dead
“Evokes a symbiotic dance between salmon and woman and for each, a pebble is placed upon the shaman’s drum.”
—GARY V. ANDERSON, SKYFIXER
“Prescott’s poems burst with the grit and muck of living off the sea, carrying us with them as they switch and twist like fish on a line, soaring to moments of wonder. There is grief here, there is joy, there is wit and heart and history.
—GERRI BRIGHTWELL, Turnback Ridge
“Grounded deeply in Southeast Alaska, salmon, and a way of life that is inextricable from them both, The Divination of Salmon is poignant, timely, evocative, and works to keep salmon swimming up our rivers for generations to come.”
—MARY CATHERINE MARTIN, Communications Director at SalmonState
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