Around 2016, Lynn Alleva Lilley began walking the woods along Sligo Creek near her Maryland home, photographing what most visitors overlook: winter light on water, a climber’s curling tendrils, dry grass, spring green. She encountered the deer, birds, cicadas, snakes and turtles that share the place, and her quiet attention — the photographs avoid the stance of a human observer set above the scene — gradually drew the book’s title out of the land itself.

In June 2022 an accident sharply limited her mobility. When she could return outdoors, she often went back to the stormwater pond near the creek, and looking closely at the pond reshaped the work. The Nest, published by The Eriskay Connection in 2023, holds 160 pages in a softcover format of 21 × 28.5 cm, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and design by Rob van Hoesel — three roles kept distinct in the publisher’s credits.

The photographs resist plain observation. Lilley works toward what the senses cannot hold directly: presence and transience, fragility and recovery, the shared conditions of a small ecosystem rather than a catalogue of species. Hirshfield’s poems give the sequence another register of attention, and the design turns the pages into a sustained encounter rather than a set of isolated images.

For collectors drawn to contemporary nature photography that thinks about ecology and about the limits of seeing, The Nest is an unusually considered object. It belongs to the same publishing program as Lilley’s earlier Tender Mint (2017) and Deep Time (2019), and it was made with the support of arts councils in Montgomery County and Maryland. Its significance lies less in novelty than in the coherence of observation, writing, and bookmaking brought together here.