In Cadastral Map, Jill Magi writes: "I enter as a writer, one kind of mapmaker, needing to ask, is traditional nature writing in English a cadastral map? Abstracting, narrowing, taking an especially strong hold in North America, the New World that never was new? Even as 'green is the new black' and environmentalism gains moral momentum, is 'nature writing' still our flawed point of origin, creating ideas of the land and nature that tend to erase people and local knowledge as we go?" In answer to these questions, Magi arrives in three states: the New Jersey farmland of her childhood, a Kentucky of deep lyricism and painful inequities, and early 20th century Vermont where progressive policies established an idea of nature, pitting local needs against policies to attract tourists. She enters these questions and sites via poetry-because "a policy is a path that is made, an effect to feel."
