New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. dj. Hardcover first edition - A verse novel which follows the story of Russel Darlington, from 1895 as "a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp" and for nearly forty years after that - "into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman." Dust jacket praise from John Updike who called it "an amazing merger of art and science, verse and narrative." Illustrated with 12 full page drawings by Mark Leithauser. 312 pp. ISBN: 0-375411488.