“A strikingly original and deeply immersive meditation on Arctic exploration, climate change, and the evolving meanings of place in a rapidly warming world.”  ---Lisa E. Bloom, Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics

“With awe and reverence for the natural environments of the north, Dianne Chisholm explores concerns with land, environment, climate change, creativity, and gender through a High Arctic expedition to Svalbard, Norway.” --- Kit Dobson, Field Notes on Listening

"The Waking Glacier is an unusual blend of musical lyricism, a scholarly eye, a photographer's sense of presence and a story of earth unravelling. Chisholm writes a homiletic white noir, at once an elegy for earth and a celebration of love. This text is an urgent hagiography of naming and a beautiful confession of absence." ---Kristjana Gunnars, The Silence of Falling Snow

"This brilliant, genre-bending book is a welcome antidote to the usual Arctic exploration narratives: a queer journey that claims no new territory, conquers no extremes—and reveals ice as we’ve never encountered it before. Absolutely sublime."  —Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders 

"In rich crevasses of words, and the lush hush of photographs, Dianne Chisholm travels north, far north, to be alive and attued to the huge presence of remote Norwegian glaciers. She queries their mysterious names and origins, and addresses them directly at times, as if recognizing, in them, their own sentience. Reading her, we awaken to a habitation with a non-human other that astounds." ---Erin Moure, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry

"To read this is to be enriched. The Waking Glacier is an exploration of 'north,' ice, artistic practice, and adventurous travel in one of the world's most remote and remarkable landscapes. Through images and words and the silences between them, Dianne Chisholm offers us a restless, playful-serious, tender lyric. Delightfully difficult to categorize, this book is written with deep knowledge, a spirit of curiosity and— most importantly—love. I've been waiting for a book as unique as this about Svalbard. Here it is!" ---Helen Mort, A Line Above the Sky

The Waking Glacier is, at once, an immersive and impressionistic travelogue of a tall-ship voyage to the High Arctic, a meditation on a life-long fascination with glaciers and a personal, poetic account of internal and external landscapes. In vivid, alluring fragments, Dianne Chisholm conveys us to a realm of shale, ice, and sea, still mostly inhospitable to human habitation, and also the fastest-warming area on the planet. Her lyric takes us to the edge of language’s capability to interpret and witness our rapidly changing world. ---Jean McNeil, Ice Diaries