In the stories of This Impossible Vertical World, characters struggle to hold fast to other lives- human and animal- as the familiar deserts them. In threatened geographies, from New Mexico and Alaska to Utah and Minnesota, these hard-tested people discover a bestiary of relations: dogs, coyotes, rattlers, whales, swans, wolves, bears, loons, and turtles. This is an ark of stories, its passengers hoping events flooding their lives will recede on a more habitable vertical world.