Her central themes are all here on display: politics and prophecy, how the land and character interact, a deep social concern for the woes of others.".

[5] Another reviewer noted how "Dreams and reality, enlightenment and practicality weave together creating an American women's portrait of life deep in the heart of regions unknown to most of us.

Early poems narrate or describe the concrete or natural: sea lions piling-on, wood ticks “vacuuming under the skin,” poet imagining porcupine love; saving soap ends.

The playful quality of those initial poems retreats, though, in the New Mexico section, where Stablein describes the Rio Grande grinding “charnel ground,” being stranded on a desiccated Route 66, and pervading images of fire and ash.

[11] Another reviewer mentioned the short style, "Among these sometimes pat and slight vignettes, the most substantial is the fable-like title story, which renders the country of Bhutan as an imaginary realm that might have emerged from the pen of Donald Barthelme.

Two of Stablein's essays anthologized in Out of the Catskills and Just Beyond,[18] and The Truth About the Territory: Contemporary Nonfiction from the Northwest[19] were collected in Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination.

"[26] In the issue of Bound and Lettered magazine which featured one of Stablein's altered books on the cover, a reviewer of the art monograph Bind, Alter, Fold: Artist Books notes the three dimensional quality of Stablein's accordion-style binding, "permits the viewer to see the billboard-like array of pages, with their colorful collage of images and text, in a way similar to a traveler observing advertising along the highway".

[27][28] Stablein used a variety of binding styles to create artist books illustrated with excerpts from her Himalayan notebooks and literary journals.

One curator notes Stablein is a "book and assemblage artist whose work explores and celebrates cultural artifacts and traditions.