“Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif is a stunning book with an extraordinary reach. Bearing lyrical witness to the grit particulars of embodiment and extinction, Regiacorte examines with a keen intimacy both the wild and the domestic, weaving a thread from the present moment back to bygone epochs. With a vivid style, American Massif features a highly original, urgent kind of concentration: ‘In the heart of my woods / I will open / for you alone a bright circle of / grasses whose / entrance will be guarded by a / seeping maple / and marked by the unearthed cheekbone of /a boulder…’ In these highly pressurized poems, Regiacorte manages to halt traffic at the intersection of time and nature, personal and animal, emergence and extinction. This is a fantastic book of poetry!”
—Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave

“At first it may seem too ‘on the nose’ to speak of our perilous shifting climate through the voice of a mastodon, ‘the elephant in the room’ as it were. But Regiacorte’s exquisite, lush lines swept my doubt away. For there is abundant humanity at the heart of this book. ‘In the heart of my woods I will open for you alone a bright circle of grasses…’ In all the ways that poetry can sway us with its art, this collection does deeply move me. ‘Spearing to the core.’ Thankfully an elephant never forgets.”
—D A Powell

“Brimming with insights and whimsy while often leaving us on the edge so subtly we don’t know how we got there, Nick Regiacorte’s American Massif is a book that simply cannot be pigeon-holed. This is work from a patient writer who has taken his time to bring us this collection of well-wrought, passionate observations of the natural world which includes human making and thought. We begin our reading with an unspoken nod to the President whose stone face resides on that most American of edifices, Mount Rushmore. Jefferson’s obsession with claiming the living ‘American Mastadon’ is never directly addressed, but reappears in this collection as if a plea or warning. Just as the ephemeral grasses sway in the wind, the mastodon sways on its forelegs toward extinction and revival through the unearthing of its bones both actions leading to profound exercises of the imagination. American Massif does not mean to be read as science, as facts. Instead here is a highly lyrical, unpredictable collection of poetry that takes surprising leaps of thought, swerving across a broad swath of landscapes, eras, philosophies, and topics, moving deftly from St. Sebastian to Van Gogh, Dayton, Ohio to Mr. Cogito, art to the garden. In some sense it reads as a natural history that covers species and soil, but it expands in to an ars urbana in its cosmopolitan insights, covering just enough to make the reading rich and engaging. In ‘Pompeiian,’ Regiacorte notes, ‘the secret is always that you are not/perishable.’ Which is one of the central concerns of this collection, What remains and what does that mean? This is a daring book of Whitmanesque measure, that explores personal and collective histories from vantages as varied as the mastodon and the father whose child is growing up faster than he can track. It will keep you rereading and discovering more each time. Regiacorte’s is that rarest of writers whose work refuses to privilege the separation of ‘I’ from ‘you’; this I is ‘we,’ all of us, every living creature, in all of our fears and curiosity, violence and vulnerability.”
—Vievee Francis