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John Haines arrived in Alaska, fresh out of the Navy, in 1947, and established a homestead seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks. He stayed there nearly twenty-five years, learning to live off the country: hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering berries, and growing vegetables. Those years formed him as a writer - the interior of Alaska, and especially its boreal forest - marking his poetry and prose and helping him find his unique voice. Placing John Haines, the first book-length study of his work, tells the story of those years, but also of his later, itinerant life, as his success as a writer led him to hold fellowships and teach at universities across the country. James Perrin Warren draws out the contradictions inherent in that biography - that this poet so indelibly associated with place, and authentic belonging, spent decades in motion - and also sets Haines's work in the context of contemporaries like Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and his close friend Wendell Berry.