David Maisel’s Cascade Effect is number 49 in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, a format that gives each artist a narrow stage: a handful of pages, a single accompanying text, and one original print. Here the stage holds a body of photographs made more than twenty years before publication, of clearcut logging sites in northern Maine.

The title refers to a chain of environmental crises set off by extinctions within an ecosystem. The images occupy that logic at ground level: felled stands, stumps, soil left without cover. An excerpt from Susan Stewart’s poem The Forest runs alongside the plates. Stewart contributes the text; the plates are Maisel’s. The publisher frames the pairing as an elegy for what has incontrovertibly vanished, and the book’s brevity keeps the images and words in close, quiet relation.

Physically, the volume is hardcover, sixteen pages, with eight duotone plates and one original print. The print is tipped in, lodged inside the book as an object as well as an illustration, and it changes how the volume is handled: not a survey to page through but a small complete statement to hold.

Cascade Effect matters within Maisel’s published work because these Maine pictures appear in print for the first time here, two decades after they were made. That long interval matters for collectors, and so does the collaboration with Stewart, which sets images and poetry in the same register. The conceit of the series concentrates rather than dilutes the project: a few plates, one print, a single poem, and nothing superfluous. For a collector interested in Maisel’s early material, the environmental subject at the root of much of his later work, or the meeting of photography and poetry, this is a book where those concerns are given unusually exact form.