One Wave Standing follows an extended metaphor as it passes through the literal geographies of ocean and desert, and the figurative one of love and family. A meditation on the nature and art of life and land, Fox alternates autobiography with the theoretical physics of growing up, marriage, and divorce. Permeating the whole is the presence or absence of water - from Point Reyes to the Great Basin - how the world is made of oceans or, as in New Mexico, what once was sea.