Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.

In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm travels to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.