The Canyon, by Robert Savino Oventile

Through poems and photos, The Canyon meditates on Eaton Canyon, a unique ecosystem nestled adjacent Pasadena and Altadena, California.

In January 2025, the Eaton Fire devastated the canyon, along with parts of Altadena and Pasadena. The Canyon reflects on the resilience of this environment, recalling how its wildlife, plants, and terrain rebounded after the 1993 Kinneloa Fire. Shaped by fire and now increasingly by human-driven climate change, Eaton Canyon is part of a larger story—one that climate scientists place within the evolving Earth System.

A celebration of Eaton Canyon’s beauty and endurance, The Canyon invites readers on a journey through an ever-changing landscape.

“This is a real collection of poems. Oventile’s limber prosody reinvents the long sentence as stanza, each poem a little logical and ecological structure all by itself. Each poem scatters out from under the whole of which they compose a part, like seeds. What Oventile bears witness to is witness as such.” – Timothy Morton, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and author of more than twenty books, including Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence and Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology