A Mile Above Texas

  “Jay B. Sauceda is creating a new kind of literature for the state, a visual literature that is as significant and powerful as John Graves’s Goodbye to a River, Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, Edna Ferber’s Giant, or T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star. His compositions accomplish what all great work does—offering a new way of seeing things so familiar that we have stopped seeing them.”—Rick Bass in Texas Monthly On the ground, Texas is a vast patchwork of natural and human landscapes—wide open spaces contrasting with sprawling cities; the watery worlds of rivers, lakes, and coastlines giving way to the arid vistas of plains and deserts. From the air, though, Texas takes on a wholeness that unites the landscapes that people manufacture with the land that nature still sculpts. This is the Texas that Jay B. Sauceda portrays in A Mile above Texas, a book of stunning aerial photographs that document the entire perimeter of the state. Sauceda flew 3,822 miles, over five days in 2015, in a si