WHAT RIVERS KNOW

Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways

2025

Book Details

Author: Basia Irland

Foreword: Lucy R. Lippard, writer, activist, curator, and author of 26 books on contemporary art, cultural criticism, and local history

Preface: Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project & 2021 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

ISBN: 9781648432569

Format: softcover

Pages: 157

Illustrations: color

Dimensions: 10" x 9" (25.5cm x 23cm)

What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways presents 25 intimate portraits of rivers from around the world, including the Seine (France), the Yaqui (Mexico), the Río Grande (US and Mexico), the Bagmati (Nepal), the Singapore, the Blue Nile (Ethiopia), the Narmada (India), and the Chaobai (China). Readers learn the rivers’ histories, current environmental health status, and evolving relationships with a variety of beings.

“The genius of these essays is that they are written in the first person, the persona of the river herself. This book delivers the writing into direct experience—not the experience of someone simply rafting and hiking and researching a river, but the experience of being a river.”

Lucy Lippard, author, curator, and cultural critic

“Basia Irland is perhaps the most significant living example of social art in the sense that she seeks to connect people to the land and to each other in a shared respect for what sustains life: water.”

Sabino Frassà, Italian curator, editor, and artistic director of CRAMUM

“A truly beautiful book, a revelation and a joy for all of us who seek to live in better communion with our Earth. Rivers have never spoken more urgently than as they do through Irland’s words, reminding us to sustain the waterways that in turn sustain us, and delivering us to the thrill of their company.”

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, senior editor, Poets & Writers Magazine

Washing dishes in the Bagmati River, Nepal.

Flute player at Blue Nile Falls, Ethiopia

Dry riverbed near Socorro, New Mexico.

Canoeing the French Broad River, North Carolina

What Rivers Know is available to order through the following online booksellers (additional sellers will be added as they become available):

North America

Texas A&M University Press (publisher)

Powells (Oregon)

Bookshop.org (US)

Europe

Waterstones (UK, Belgium, Netherlands)

Blackwell's (UK)

Asia/South Pacific

Angus & Robertson (Australia)

Fishpond (New Zealand)

Global

Amazon: most country-specific Amazon sites currently have the book in stock

North Fork Virgin River as it flows through Zion National Park, Utah.