Cultural Writing. Travel. The Portuguese word "saudade" has no direct English translation. In its simplest sense, it describes a feeling of longing for something that is now gone, and may yet return, but in all likelihood can never be recaptured. In SAUDADE, traveler Anik See traces her attempts to reclaim this loss in a series of informal essays that take us from the salt plains of Wood Buffalo National Park and the mountains of British Columbia to the fishing ports of Sri Lanka and the rough roads of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Whether at a fishfry in the Northwest Territories, at the post-9/11 Canada-US border, on the ultimate road trip through Australia or at a summer carnival in Santiago de Cuba, See is on a continual quest for simplicity, interrogating the perceived distance between privilege and want. Quietly, insistently, these thoughtful essays ask what we might accomplish if we said no to entitlement; if, instead, we used our privilege to help us better understand human nature.

Anik See is the author of the food memoir A Fork in the Road (MacMillan, 2000). Her writing has appeared in Brick, Prairie Fire, the Fiddlehead, Geist, Grain, the National Post, Toronto Life and, as a contributing editor, in Outpost Magazine. She divides her time between Canada and Holland, where she works with books, old and new. Her new short story collection will be published by Freehand Books in 2009.