Iron Fever

"After early years growing up in Montana and Wisconsin, Stephan Torre spent his teen years in Monterey, California. After college in Berkeley and San Francisco, he lived on the Big Sur and Mendocino coasts, working as a "wood butcher," building houses, and salvaging redwood logs. Torre later went north to settle on a remote homestead in the Canadian Rockies with his wife and two daughters, scratching a living from livestock and sawmills. Eventually, he moved south to Point Reyes, California, then to the Great Basin high desert, where he now lives on a small ranch at the base of the Warner Mountains. Given his priority for living in raw and untamed country, Torre's poems are seldom without reference to wild landscape. He resists, however, being called a "nature poet," since he frequently deals with traditional rural male work, gender, privilege, art, and the tensions inherent in people's rapacious claims of land ownership.