The fifth volume of the West Marin Review, an award-winning literary journal published in collaboration with Point Reyes Books, has hit bookstores. This year’s 140-page collection of prose, poetry and artwork was curated by a steering committee from hundreds of submissions. The first line of verse in this edition begins, “If the object…” Take it as a guide of what’s to come: a series of meditations on the things and places of our lives, from chromatic patterns of individual strands of horsehair in T.C. Moore’s compositions, to purchasing chips and soda from the vending machines in Tom Foley’s visit to San Quentin, to an eighth grade girl’s observation that her hands are “a bit of my father on my mother’s figure.” “If the object…” also presents a hypothetical about purpose. If the goal—the object—is change, how do we accomplish it and what do we lose in the process? The editors give us lines like Dean Rader’s from the poem “Notes on Inequality”: “What is courage / after all but the / absence of ego, / the dissolution of the self in / the face of / annihilation?” If the object was to articulate the values behind the strange hodgepodge of writers and ranchers, musicians and retirees that compose our coastal villages, the West Marin Review gives a true picture of what we are and what we strive to be, at once concerned about our place in our environment and as curious and imaginative as the children’s pictures that decorate the journal. A grand celebration of the release will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, June 1 at Toby’s Feed Barn. Music and refreshments will be provided and contributors will share from their work.