The West has always been and continues to be a place of clashes and liminality. It exists as both an idea and an environment that records and reflects what we are and what was before. When thinking of the West, it is easy to think of Cowboys and dusty sunsets, but the new issue of About Place Journal, “Strange Wests,” dives deeper than that. It analyzes what the West is: a place of strangeness that is both knowable in its strangeness and a deep mystery in time, location, and place. A wide space of connection and solitude that is hard to explain and articulate in any other way than poetry, prose, and creative nonfiction. Check out the new issue here: