Couturier's essays shine with her candor, her perception, and her affection for the creatures of our world. Whether the subject is a snake or a falcon or a crow named Edgar, these essays will both enlighten and give much reading pleasure. -Mary Oliver In The Hopes of Snakes, Lisa Couturier celebrates the stories of forgotten, overlooked animals who have adapted nobly to city and suburban life in the Northeast. With sharp perception and deep humanity, she has found what is so remarkable in the nature we see most often and illuminated it like no one before her. The Hopes of Snakes is an eloquent and powerful debut by one of the best new writers exploring nature in the humanized landscape. Couturier enters the terrain staked out by Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge. In these moving essays, Couturier does not so much domesticate the wilderness as reveal the wildness within the domestic. -Publishers Weekly The essays combine nature writing, philosophy, theology and feminism . . . the writing is lyrical, even when Couturier explores the ecology of New York's subways. -USA Today Beautiful, intelligent, and literary . . . this book is a wondrous pleasure, yet it has the ability to shift the way you look at the natural world. The Hopes of Snakes belongs on the bookshelf next to Edward Abbey's The Serpents of Paradise and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and, like those, is a book to savor, to know, to love and to share. -The Oregonian Lisa Couturier's essays have appeared in literary anthologies, including the well-regarded American Nature Writing series and National Geographic's Heart of a Nation. She has worked as an environmental journalist and a magazine editor. She writes and teaches in the Washington, DC, area, where she lives with her family along the Potomac River.