A lyrical collection examines the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis

The Way of the Earth is the fourth collection from award-winning poet Matthew Shenoda. In this, his most personal collection to date, he explores the temporal and fleeting nature of human life and the earth we inhabit. Through ruminations on the intersections of culture and ecology, the death of loved ones, and the growing inequities in our midst, Shenoda explores what it means to be a person both grounded to the earth and with a yearning beyond it. Memories of landscapes and histories echo throughout the sensations of the present: the sight of egrets wading in the marshes, the smell of the ocean, a child’s hand nestled in a warm palm. “Time never goes back,” Shenoda writes, “but the imagination must.”

MATTHEW SHENODA is a writer as well as a professor and chair of the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award. He is the editor, with Kwame Dawes, of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly, 2017), and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.

“These poems meditate on fragments of memory that make up life. A door is cracked, a window, letting in the whole of the world where ‘all the ways of knowing have never added up to a single whole. A birdcall is a birdcall.’ In moments that recall the loss of a child and ask us to witness grief, we are also asked to find a way beyond pain. These poems are prayers against sorrow, and as Shenoda writes they are what might lead us, even if only for a moment, to the sacred.” —Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems— -

“Out of this quiet, meditative work something prayerful as attention emerges and fills my lives with deepest feeling. I am awakened into wonder by this voice made of root and wind and waters, glinting with memory, all time touching inside it.” —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

“This gorgeous book is full of captivating description and introspective wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly 

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PRAISE FOR MATTHEW SHENODA
 
“Matthew Shenoda uses a quiet language to bring some of the most striking lyrical intensity one will ever read.” —A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste: Poems

“A poet with deep roots in a dozen worlds, Matthew Shenoda is also a deft and savvy storyteller whose voice can't be everywhere soon enough.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art: Poems (TriQuarterly Books)
 
“Through Matthew’s work, we learn that poetry is both about speaking up and about surviving and as long as we do these things, ‘they just cannot touch us.’” —Adrian Matejka, Ploughshares— -