Joe Wilkins directs the creative writing program at Linfield University, where he also teaches courses in poetry, environmental writing and literature from rural America.

Poet, author, memoirist and Linfield University teacher, Joe Wilkins has come out with a wrenching new novel that offers thoughts as deep as they are wide-ranging — on place, trust and family.

Set in 1994, and some years before, “The Entire Sky” entwines the stories of a teenage runaway, a recently widowed rancher and a grown daughter who is trying to pinpoint the cause of her sense of estrangement.

Justin is the runaway. His early years have been shaped by abandonment and abuse. By 1994, he is a homeless teenager trying to scrape by as a guitar-playing busker on the streets of Seattle. It ain’t Nirvana, but he does favor Kurt Cobain’s music.

When Justin unexpectedly encounters his mother on the street one day, she doesn’t take him back. But she does buy him some clothes and a meal, and gives him enough cash for a bus ticket to western Montana, where he can live with her brother and his family.

When Justin gets there, though, his uncle’s small-scale logging operation is falling apart, and with it, the family.

Justin’s already had his fill of dysfunction and violence so he flees again, and holes up in an abandoned camphouse on remote ranchland in eastern Montana.

That’s where Rene Bouchard, the sheep rancher who owns the spread, finds him. Rene has been recently widowed, and he’s just fired his ranch hand for slacking. When he comes upon this thin, disheveled kid, he is reminded of one of his own sons who died years before.

And then there’s Rene’s grown daughter, Lianne, who had come back to care for her mom in her final days, and who is trying to put her dad’s affairs into some kind of order before returning to her husband and kids in Spokane.

All three of these people — Justin, Rene and Lianne — are at loose ends. All three have lost trust in the idea of things turning out for the best. Each of them has been hurt and has caused hurt.

But this is April — lambing season — and there is work that cannot be ignored.

Wilkins writes eloquently about the externals — from Seattle’s gritty streets to the Montana landscape, where clouds drift by, “their shadows on the prairie below like great, dark ships moving of their own accord and dignity.”

The author is even more perceptive about the challenging emotional terrain his characters are trying to navigate: whether that’s Rene’s dwindling future or Lianne’s suppressed nightmares and dreams.

And especially, Wilkins writes about the plight of teen boys who can’t find a place to fit in.

“We tell ourselves all kinds of things, but mostly we tell ourselves these boys don’t mean anything, that they are not somehow an indictment, a prophecy, a metaphor among so many for the failure of the republic,” Wilkins writes.

“The Entire Sky” fluctuates between springtime blue promise and the lightning-slash sting of rejection and despair, and finds another patch of blue by the book’s end.

This story packs a punch.

This week’s book

“The Entire Sky” by Joe Wilkins

Little, Brown and Co. — 394 pp — $29