"The author puts forward a bracing theory of partial empathy....Johnston's searching book of thought-probes goes a long way toward allowing the reader the grounding that would allow him to make empathic contacts with the animals over which he ponders....Each time another animal becomes extinct a special and irretrievable way of looking at the world is gone....Perhaps the more people that read this book, the more this absence would be poignantly felt."—The Brooklyn Rail "Creaturely, like its subjects, eludes definition. It's a book of exquisite essays—or are they prose poems—that tessellate into something larger: a meditation, perhaps, or a vision. Johnston's subject is at once the absolute otherness of the creatures with whom we share the world's everyday spaces—dogs, owls, mice, squirrels, crows—and the worth of our attempts to get to know them. Modest, calm, and beautiful, this is an exceptional book."—Robert Macfarlane

Please see selling points. Also, in marketing the book, the publisher will refer to a few models: Merrill Gilfillan's Magpie Rising: Sketches of the Great Plains (for its energetic and compact style), Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory (interconnected essays on Belfast) and of course Thoreau's Walden.