"Writer-poet William L. Fox has spent much of his career contemplating the complex ways that landscape, human cognition, and history collide to create our perceptions and treatment of place. In Playa Works, Fox considers the West's emptiest spaces - the playas, or dry beds, of the ancient lakes that once filled much of the Great Basin. Among the flattest, most barren places on the planet, the West's playas have haunted the American imagination since the Fremont expedition first surveyed them in the early nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.