What Water Holds is, as are all of Empty Bowl Press’s books, beautifully made. The cover, by Sitka artist Lisa Teas Conaway, features a floating bird feather and rippling salmon, and so many blues: blue sky giving way to a surface panoply of blues giving way to water’s aquamarines giving way to depths of blue-black. In twenty-six essays organized into five sections, Aadsen takes readers on a journey from when she is a “an underdressed three-year-old” admiring a king salmon caught by her grandfather, to when that child is a deckhand and co-owner / operator of a fishing vessel, and old enough to be measuring how much longer she can physically keep up with the work. Aadsen celebrates the fish, and the industry, while refusing to flinch from the conundrum they present for a person of conscience . . .
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