Whitmanesque in scope and success, these poems and images create an America that holds us safe just as it terrifies, that asks us to question our individual participation in a larger American mythology. A visual and literary achievement of the highest degree, this is a book I want to live inside forever. – Andrea Scarpino, 2015-17 Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and author of What the Willow Said as it Fell

Words and images perfectly interpenetrated — a subtle duet of imagination and passion — a book more than the sum of its parts that invites the imagination along its intricate, spacious pathways, its white spaces, its vistas opening inward toward the infinite forest of soul. A soundless, resounding triumph. – Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and author of Refractions

Saara Myrene Raappana writes, “Let us each know ourselves as wild, spinning universes. / Let us each feel tethered to a single center, dizzy.” Reading these poems and experiencing the swirling art of Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton encourages the reader to spin back to the idea of sauntering as Thoreau considers it at the start of his famous essay. To put it more succinctly, A Story of America Goes Walking is a book of sauntering, of moving toward, into, and through the holy land and moving with the attentive eye and ear of an exile. This is a book that meditates on unrootedness and the sacred, as well as who gets to decide such demarcations. Enjoy this collection—a rare and fine one—where text and image seem bound together in the best sort of synergistic energy. – Tod Marshall, 2016-18 Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Bugle.