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.