What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest , the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica--with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs--refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination...