These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.
 

Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches as a full professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she is the author of Breath on a Coal—winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, runner-up for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize, and long-listed for The Laurel Prize—and the chapbook Living with Wolves. Her poetry has been widely published in journals such as Orion Magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, and Terrain.org. Her honors include a Narrative Annual Poetry Contest prize, a Ginkgo Ecopoetry prize, the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize, and a special mention for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Wrangell Mountains Center in McCarthy, Alaska. She is currently a poetry editor for the online journal Terrain.org.