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.