Author: Maximilian Werner
ISBN: 978-0-88839-793-5 [Paperback]
ISBN: 978-0-88839-794-2 [eBook]
Binding: Trade Paperback
Size: 5.5" X 8.5"
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 01 November 2026

Table of Contents

Sample Chapter

What does it mean to be human in a world we have spent centuries trying to place ourselves above?

In The Bone Pile, Maximilian Werner brings together essays that explore the uneasy and often contradictory relationship between human culture and the natural world. Moving from trout streams and hunting grounds to encounters with wolves, hawks, deer, fire, death, and the altered landscapes of the American West, Werner examines what the lives of other animals, and our treatment of them, can teach us about ourselves.

At once personal, philosophical, and grounded in ecological thinking, these essays challenge familiar assumptions about civilization, morality, religion, technology, and human exceptionalism. Werner draws on evolutionary biology and lived experience to consider humans not as observers standing outside nature, but as animals shaped by the same forces that govern every other living thing.

Provocative without losing its sense of wonder, *The Bone Pile* asks readers to look more closely at the stories we tell about ourselves and the living world around us, and to consider what becomes possible when we begin to see ourselves as part of nature rather than apart from it.

Maximilian Werner is an award-winning teacher and author of seven books, including the environmental novel and Utah Book Award finalist Crooked Creek, the memoir Gravity Hill, and the nonfiction monograph Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death and Coexistence in the American West. His poems and essays have appeared in a wide array of academic and literary journals, such as The Ecological Citizen, Blaze Vox, The Robert Frost Review, The Journal of the West, Clade Song, CounterPunch, Written River: A Journal of Ecopoetics, Matter Journal: Edward Abbey Edition, Bright Lights Film Journal, The North American Review, ISLE, Weber Studies, and Columbia.  He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University.

"Inspired by fly fishing, household tasks, family, friendship, and beautiful scenery, these meditative essays on nature, technology, ecology, religion, and wildness amplify awareness and wonder. They awaken us to think deeply even as we go about life’s most ordinary errands."

— David K Leff, author of Canoeing Maine’s Legendary Allagash

"Maximilian Werner is a fly fisher with the heart of a poet—or perhaps a poet with the heart of a fly fisher. The Bone Pile doesn’t set out to preach metaphysics. It sets out to describe what is, and it does so with a careful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking observation and prose. But while the beauty of the writing is in the details...the book also does what the river in one of Werner’s essays does: it ‘shows us how we appear on the outside, but it also shows us what’s happening on the inside.”

— Matthew Dickerson, author of Trout in the Desert