A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Results by Title
70 books about Animals & Nature
70 books about Animals & Nature
23 Woodcock in 22 Years
Reflections on Hunting, the Night Sky, and Our Place in the Universe
Jeff Wilkerson
University of Iowa Press, 2024
In 23 Woodcock in 22 Years, Jeff Wilkerson interweaves his twin passions of astrophysics and game hunting. Stories of how we understand the universe mesh with stories of time in the field, and in doing so capture the uncanny phenomenon of the passage of time: everything evolves around us while we expect our world to remain unchanged.
As Wilkerson’s thoughts soar to the stars that produced the chemical elements that form us and all the land and its creatures, simple reflections on going afield to harvest a woodcock for a special holiday meal ground him. What emerges is a love story about a bird, the land, and all of creation from atomic nuclei to the farthest reaches of the universe, and a reminder to acknowledge the gentle flow of time while cherishing the everyday existence around us.
As Wilkerson’s thoughts soar to the stars that produced the chemical elements that form us and all the land and its creatures, simple reflections on going afield to harvest a woodcock for a special holiday meal ground him. What emerges is a love story about a bird, the land, and all of creation from atomic nuclei to the farthest reaches of the universe, and a reminder to acknowledge the gentle flow of time while cherishing the everyday existence around us.
[more]
The Air in the Air Behind It
Brandon Rushton
Tupelo Press, 2022
‘With an eye roving like a documentary camera, Brandon Rushton delivers a post-wonder diorama of the contemporary non-urban United States in which the vaunted American lawn is artificial; the food is full of chemicals; and “what haven’t we / homogenized.” The freedoms of childhood and adolescence are figured here as a kind of lost, damaged paradise before everyone erases themselves into their adult roles: the contractor, the customer, the detective, the pilot, the bank teller, the embezzler, the broker, the milkshake maker. Rushton’s often interweaving lines serve as a formal objective correlative for our interwoven state in this world, which is composed of both the given and the made; the question of why on earth we have chosen what we have made is quietly fuming in every poem. “Honestly, the people / had hoped for more space / to feel spectacular.” The news about that spectacular feeling isn’t good, but knowing Rushton is out there watching, giving a damn, and writing his beautiful poems is reason for hope.’
—Donna Stonecipher
—Donna Stonecipher
[more]
Altars of Spine and Fraction
Poems
Nicholas Molbert
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A debut poetry collection set in and around Louisiana’s fishing village of Cocodrie
Altars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.
Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by boys raised in the Deep South.
[more]
At The Drive-In Volcano
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Tupelo Press, 2007
From the author of the award-winning book of poems, Miracle Fruit, comes the eagerly anticipated second collection, At the Drive-In Volcano. In this new and imaginative followup, Aimee Nezhukumatathil examines the full circle journey of desire, loss, and ultimately, an exuberant lovetraveling around a world brimming with wild and delicious offerings such as iced waterfalls, jackfruit, and pistol shrimp. From the tropical landscapes of the Caribbean, India, and the Philippines to the deep winters of western New York and mild autumns of Ohio, the natural world Nezhukumatathil describes is dark but also lovelyso full of enchantment and magic. Here, worms glow in the dark, lizards speak, the most delicious soup in the world turns out to be deadly, and a woman eats soil as if it were candy. Her trademark charm, verve and wit remain elemental and a delight to behold, even in the face of a crumbling relationship. These poems confront delicate subjects of love and loss with an exacting exuberance and elegance not hardly seen in a writer so young.
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Bicycle Cowboy
And Other Poems About Growing Up
Ron Helmboldt
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
Ride along with the Bicycle Cowboy as he shares growing-up-in-small-town Michigan stories through free verse poetry
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B/RDS
Béatrice Szymkowiak
University of Utah Press, 2023
B/RDS endeavors to dismantle discourses that create an artificial distinction between nature and humanity through a subversive erasure of an iconic work of natural history: John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838). This process of erasure considers the text of Birds of America as an archival cage. The author selectively erases words from the textual cage to reveal its ambiguity and the complex relationship between humanity and the other-than-human world. As the cage disappears, leaving a space for scarce, lyrical poems, birds break free, their voices inextricably entangled with ours.
Prose poems written in the author’s own words and prompted by the erasure process are also interspersed throughout the collection. These migratory poems, like ripples, trace the link between past and present and reveal the human-nature disconnect at the root cause of environmental and social problems, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
Along its five movements, B/RDS also explores how we can reimagine our relationship to environment through language within new frameworks of interconnectedness. Thus, as the collection resists the distinction between nature and culture on which traditional nature poetry relies, it also acts as an ecopoetic manifesto. It suggests that a critical, lyrical poetry could contribute to ecological awareness by singing humanity back within nature.
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Bright Raft in the Afterweather
Poems
Jennifer Elise Foerster
University of Arizona Press, 2018
In her dazzling new book, Jennifer Elise Foerster announces a frightening new truth: “the continent is dismantling.” Bright Raft in the Afterweather travels the spheres of the past, present, future, and eternal time, exploring the fault lines that signal the break of humanity’s consciousness from the earth.
Featuring recurring characters, settings, and motifs from her previous book, Leaving Tulsa, Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds.
Foerster’s captivating language and evocative imagery immerse the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster’s refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance.
In a world wrought with ecological imbalance and grief, Foerster shows how from the devastated land of our alienation there is potential to reconnect to our origins and redefine the terms by which we inhabit humanity and the earth.
Featuring recurring characters, settings, and motifs from her previous book, Leaving Tulsa, Foerster takes the reader on a solitary journey to the edges of the continents of mind and time to discover what makes us human. Along the way, the author surveys the intersection between natural landscapes and the urban world, baring parallels to the conflicts between Native American peoples and Western colonizers, and considering how imagination and representation can both destroy and remake our worlds.
Foerster’s captivating language and evocative imagery immerse the reader in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. Each poem blends Foerster’s refined use of language with a mythic and environmental lyricism as she explores themes of destruction, spirituality, loss, and remembrance.
In a world wrought with ecological imbalance and grief, Foerster shows how from the devastated land of our alienation there is potential to reconnect to our origins and redefine the terms by which we inhabit humanity and the earth.
[more]
Coffin Honey
Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2022
In Coffin Honey, his seventh book of poems, celebrated poet Todd Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share the planet. Here racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction—both personal and across ecosystems—are dramatized in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young boy who has been sexually assaulted struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. Each poem in Coffin Honey seeks to illuminate beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking nearer to in the twenty-first century. As with his past prize-winning volumes, Davis, whose work Orion Magazine likens to that of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”
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Companion Grasses
Brian Teare
Omnidawn, 2013
What does it mean to dwell in a place? These adventurous poems go on foot in search of answers. Walking the cities, coasts, forests and mountains of Northern California and New England, they immerse themselves in the specifics of bioregion and microclimate, and take special note of the cycle of death and rebirth that plays out dramatically in California’s chaparral and grasslands. Inspired by Transcendentalism, Companion Grasses sees the sacred in the workings of the material world, but its indebtedness to the ecological tradition of California poets like Gary Snyder and Brenda Hillman means that it also unearths such evidence in the sensual materiality of words themselves. Both ecologically rich landscapes and highly rhythmic inscapes, these poems set seasonal and human dramas side-by-side, wresting an original, signature music from the meeting of site and sight. In pursuing an aesthetics situated in place, they compose an ethics of what it means to be a human companion to the natural world: “What we love, how we care for it,/is where we live.”
[more]
Count
Valerie Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Central to this vital work of ecopoetry is the idea of counting—counting down to the extinction of a species, counting the wonders of the natural world, counting our way back to the balance that is required to save ourselves from climate destruction. Filled with a sense of grief and sorrow for the current state of the planet, Count also offers a glimmering hope that future generations will restore our damaged environment.
With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future. This beautiful, tragic, and unusual poem is a testimonial, a warning, and a call to action that will captivate lovers of contemporary poetry and ecopoetry, environmentalists, and climate activists alike. Count skillfully calls on our collective desire to leave a livable world, filled with the potential for healing, as a legacy to the generations of children that come after us.
With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future. This beautiful, tragic, and unusual poem is a testimonial, a warning, and a call to action that will captivate lovers of contemporary poetry and ecopoetry, environmentalists, and climate activists alike. Count skillfully calls on our collective desire to leave a livable world, filled with the potential for healing, as a legacy to the generations of children that come after us.
[more]
Creature
Michael Dumanis
Four Way Books
Creature is a complex poetics of vitality, and it immaculately cleaves: even as it underscores how living in an inherently inhospitable environment will dispossess us of the world and one another, making animal of man, it sutures the rent evolutionary tree, glorifying the interdependence of each extant thing. Michael Dumanis expertly cultivates the multiplicity of language and makes of “creature” a marvelous contronym; we are a creature as in a beast, debased, beholden to nature, and we are creature as in an extension of creation, improbably sentient, mortal, here. In “Autobiography,” the speaker attests to the contradiction at the root of cognizance: “Am, as an animal, // anxious. Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing accident: alive.” How does the human mammal embody both and neither — communal and itinerant, leaving home to approach it, as an immigrant and a geographic nomad, as someone’s child and another’s parent, as being and thing? How do we negotiate our ouroboric identities while attuned to not just our own fragility, but an impending global extinction event? The answer is the absence of answer. “In the beginning, I thought a great deal / about death and sunlight, et cetera,” Dumanis admits in “Squalor,” but “The Double Dream of Spring” absolves us of outsmarting impermanence. “O what a ball I had, spending the days.” And what should we do in this vernal brevity but exhaust it? We each only have so long to trace our hand “over the stony bones / that, fused together, hold [our] only face.”
[more]
Ditch Memory
New and Selected Poems
Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2024
In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, celebrated poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.
[more]
The Dream Women Called
Lori Wilson
Autumn House Press, 2021
Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.
This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
[more]
The Dream Women Called
Lori Wilson
Autumn House Press, 2021
Through the poems in The Dream Women Called, Lori Wilson attends to the spirits of depression, uncertainty, and fear while wondering at the beauty in what’s broken, the remarkable in the ordinary, and the balm that the natural world can offer. Following a single speaker, we’re reminded how many lives one woman can live.
This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
This book is about crossing into a new version of your own story—after a marriage ends, the parents die, the children are grown, or the faith is discarded—and finding a place to stand, a new way to take up space in the world. Uniting past and present, these poems create multifaceted portraits, particularly of relationships between mothers and daughters. Wilson’s poems sift through memory, dreams, art, imagination, nature, and close observation, turning each discovery over in order to see it fully. Beneath the fine-grained imagery of these lyric excavations are the sometimes opposing but fundamental desires to be whole and to be seen, which often means looking within as well as turning toward the world outside. The speaker is listening always for the dream women who call, for whatever may beckon from the present and future, preparing her in some way for a life that’s truly hers.
[more]
Eclogues and Georgics
Vergil, Translated by James Bradley Wells
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
James Bradley Wells combines creative practice and intimate knowledge of contemporary poetry and classical antiquity in this thought-provoking new translation of two early works by ancient Rome’s most well-known and most esteemed poet, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics. With its emphasis on the musicality of English, Wells’s translations honor the original spirit of Latin poetry as both a written and performance-based art form.
The accompanying introductory essays situate Vergil’s poems in a rich literary tradition. Wells provides historical context and literary analysis of these two works, eschewing facile interpretations of these oft examined texts and ensconcing them in the society and culture from which they originated. These annotated essays, a pronunciation guide, and a glossary, alongside Wells’s bold vision for what translation choices can reveal, guide readers as they explore this ancient and famously difficult poetry.
The accompanying introductory essays situate Vergil’s poems in a rich literary tradition. Wells provides historical context and literary analysis of these two works, eschewing facile interpretations of these oft examined texts and ensconcing them in the society and culture from which they originated. These annotated essays, a pronunciation guide, and a glossary, alongside Wells’s bold vision for what translation choices can reveal, guide readers as they explore this ancient and famously difficult poetry.
[more]
Even the Least of These
Anita Skeen
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Even the Least of These is a collaboration between two talented friends—award-winning poet Anita Skeen and renown printmaker Laura B. DeLind. Seeking to navigate the isolation and uncertainty of the covid-19 pandemic, they challenged each other’s ability to see the small things often neglected and unnoticed. The result is a thoughtful and often joyful collection of poetry and prints that celebrate an awareness of the world around us and reflect on past experiences, lessons learned (or not). This collaboration includes a collection of prints that evoke the feeling of the poems, ranging from humorous to heart-rendering.
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Every Species of Hope
Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems
Michael J. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In his first book of poetry in twenty years, Michael J. Rosen captures life in the foothills of the Appalachians. Every Species of Hope: Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems uses a variety of poetic forms, as well as Rosen’s own pen-and-ink drawings, to give voice to the predicaments of living among other creatures who share a plot of land we think we claim as home. The poems are an attempt at homeostasis: that balancing act every creature works at every hour of every day—a way of living peacefully, expending the right energy in the most productive ways, avoiding or deflecting trouble, gravitating toward sources of fulfillment and contentment.
At the center of this book is a suite of poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, or “poems of pastoral instruction.” In Rosen’s case, he is more the student than the teacher. Likewise, five short sections of haiku continue his meditation on—or mediation of—art and nature. As he has written, “Haiku provides a brief and mirror-like calm in the choppy waters—in the undertow—of current events: a stillness in time where more than our singular lives can be reflected.”
Illustrated with two dozen pages from the author’s own journal, Every Species of Hope is the consummation of decades of observation, humility, and awe.
At the center of this book is a suite of poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, or “poems of pastoral instruction.” In Rosen’s case, he is more the student than the teacher. Likewise, five short sections of haiku continue his meditation on—or mediation of—art and nature. As he has written, “Haiku provides a brief and mirror-like calm in the choppy waters—in the undertow—of current events: a stillness in time where more than our singular lives can be reflected.”
Illustrated with two dozen pages from the author’s own journal, Every Species of Hope is the consummation of decades of observation, humility, and awe.
[more]
extraordinary tides
Pattie McCarthy
Omnidawn, 2023
A poetry chapbook that reflects on shifting time and tides through the language of the shoreline.
Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral.
McCarthy's extraordinary tides is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.
Pattie McCarthy’s extraordinary tides occupies a space in the intertidal, the in-between place of not-quite-land and not-quite-sea. The poems reflect on passing time, fluctuating tides, and on our efforts to predict both. Upon a ground that is always in flux beneath us, McCarthy invites us to question if and how we really know where we are. Considering the language of the tides, the poems in this chapbook make a wrackline palimpsest, a seastruck archive, a marginalia of the littoral.
McCarthy's extraordinary tides is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, chosen by Rae Armantrout.
[more]
Far Country
Poems
Kyce Bello
University of Nevada Press, 2025
In her new collection, Far Country, Kyce Bello documents an unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium for deepening connection and love. In poems firmly rooted in the Southwestern bioregion, landscape and language are layered into vivid sequences where the personal, collective, and ecological merge and illuminate one another. Ultimately, the collection forms a new map of the unknown, traveling to a realm in which worlds both seen and unseen are fused into a rich tapestry of lyric exploration and wonder. In the poem, “The Bend,” a woman asks, “How do we survive this?” Far Country is not an answer, but a witnessing and embrace that becomes its own act of resilience and transformation.
[more]
![front cover of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-1-63243-118-9-thumb.jpg)
From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn, 2023
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam.
This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process.
Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process.
Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.
[more]
Garden Theology
Seán Mac Falls
Tupelo Press, 2022
The great tradition of Irish poetry courses through Seán Mac Falls’ blood and into his lines, as if he has spent a lifetime inhaling the sea breezes, cliffs, and peat bogs, ennobled from William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney to Eavan Boland. Here in a generous volume is a stunning treasury of pleasures, direct and appealing in voice, earthbound and empyrean in spirit, epistemological and rare.
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Habitat Threshold
Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn, 2019
With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.”
Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.
Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.
[more]
Harm
Hillary Gravendyk
Omnidawn, 2012
Offering a new narrative of physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact, Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked- for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. Troubling the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, Harm shifts between warning and error, nature and the body. In the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Moving amid the prose poem and the lyric, Harm navigates a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders.
[more]
Here
Sydney Lea
Four Way Books, 2019
In his thirteenth book of poetry, Sydney Lea gives voice to the deep connection between human life and the natural world as well as their fragility and transience. Here, nature is as much a muse as a trigger for sense memory—as a schoolboy on a playground “breathing in autumn mud, / that cherished aroma” or as witness to a redtail hawk’s attack and the aftermath during which “That poor doomed duckling’s wisps of down / Floated in air like snowflakes, /Diaphanous.” Death is a constant presence in these poems, too, arising from the bittersweet awareness of what eventually will be lost. While there is reckoning, there are few regrets in a life well-lived and closely observed. Here is a title, but it’s also a statement, an incantation and affirmation: “Let’s chant it throughout the year,” Lea writes, “like so much birdsong: we’re here we’re here we’re here.”
[more]
How to Abandon Ship
Sasha West
Four Way Books, 2024
In How to Abandon Ship, Sasha West harnesses poetry as a vessel to ferry the inconceivable, to wreck upon the shores of what we’ve known thus far. Assessing the accelerating emergencies of climate change amid the West’s self-cannibalizing capitalism, the speaker of these poems wrestles with the state of the world and its compounding catastrophes as a new parent. That fierce love becomes her grappling hook into the glut of information and epochal view of time and space we must scale to leave our children a habitable, equitable planet. To approach a perspective too vast for the individual mind, West cycles through personae which collectively metabolize the strands of the past, and the foundational myths of Western civilization, that constructed this looming future. West speaks as a contemporary mother and an ancient proxy, the unheeded Greek oracle Cassandra; gives voice to fossil fuels; and imagines grown children, real and mythological, surviving beyond a world our generation preemptively mourns. “I have taken / my voice past the threshold, past / the lintel,” Cassandra addresses readers and, more broadly, a paralyzed and apathetic public. “I am speaking to you now from / inside the wildfire while it burns the hair / from my body: I don’t expect you will listen.” But while making space for climate grief, holding our faces up to the ever-expanding sinkhole of earthly loss, West liberates us unto joy, enjoining us to remake the narratives that drive our culture, our consumption, and our relationship to the non-human world. Cassandra’s daughter rides the ship as it sinks, declaring, “I am being shaped / into something new, waiting, / listening to birds give out song / before / the songs give out.” And Cassandra’s granddaughter endures to remind us that, when the sails buckle, we need not drown if we choose to swim. “When you were still alive and apt to get weepy over what you saw as rubbled landscapes, I was impatient. Only a tourist fetishizes the ground where tragedy occurred…. What needs to be done, we do. We act in tiny increments.” These splinters compose the timeless story of humanity: we love each other because we cannot help it; we fail, and fail repeatedly; we go on.
[more]
Impastoral
Brandan Griffin
Omnidawn, 2022
Poems that blur the boundaries of language and species, inviting us to imagine a new world.
The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides—slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin’s poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings—slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts—morph and change in between boundaries.
Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems’ composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world.
Impastoral won the Omnidawn Open Book contest, selected by Brian Teare.
The expansive reworking of language in Impastoral flies through the possible voices of outsides and insides—slug, probe, horse carriage, sewer, potted plant, lab rat, vampire, bot fly, giant cow. Language, in Brandan Griffin’s poetry, is neither human nor nonhuman, and it undoes that very idea of these distinctions, so beings—slugprobe, pottedhorsesewer, telepathybarcode, mammaltexts—morph and change in between boundaries.
Each of these poems is an organism, a collection of living connections, looped interiorities strung together in worlds tunneling through worlds. The poems’ composition becomes a decomposition of budding, breeding, and fluctuating. Reading this collection is an experience of becoming deformed and merged into the experiences of other beings; you are sea vent, microprocessor, cell gel, bug, a greenly translucent leaf typed half a sound at a time. Griffin invites us to imagine all possible beings and to hatch into a fresh world.
Impastoral won the Omnidawn Open Book contest, selected by Brian Teare.
[more]
In the Antarctic Circle
Dennis James Sweeney
Autumn House Press, 2021
This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator’s gender skips and changes, and the characters’ self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney’s poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever.
The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.
In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.
In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
[more]
In the Antarctic Circle
Dennis James Sweeney
Autumn House Press, 2021
This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator’s gender skips and changes, and the characters’ self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney’s poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever.
The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.
In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.
In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
[more]
In the Kingdom of the Ditch
Todd Davis
Michigan State University Press, 2013
In poetry that is at once accessible and finely crafted, Todd Davis maps the mysterious arc between birth and death, celebrating the beauty and pain of our varied entrances and exits, while taking his readers into the deep forests and waterways of the northeastern United States. With an acute sensibility for language unlike any other working poet, Davis captures the smallest nuances in the flowers, trees, and animals he encounters through a daily life spent in the field. Davis draws upon stories and myths from Christian, Transcendental, and Buddhist traditions to explore the intricacies of the spiritual and physical world we too often overlook. In celebrating the abundant life he finds in a ditch—replete with Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed, raspberries and blackberries, goldenrod and daisies—Davis suggests that life is consistently transformed, resurrected by what grows out of the fecundity of our dying bodies. In his fourth collection the poet, praised by The Bloomsbury Review, Arts & Letters, and many others, provides not only a taxonomy of the flora and fauna of his native Pennsylvania but also a new way of speaking about the sacred walk we make with those we love toward the ultimate mystery of death.
[more]
Interior Femme
Poems
Stephanie Berger
University of Nevada Press, 2022
In her debut collection, Stephanie Berger cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside.” In a sequence of poems that present variations on the Western feminine archetype, Interior Femme visits many unique locales, from cemeteries in Brooklyn to canyons in New Mexico to churches in San Diego, Paris, and Peru. Berger approaches her subjects—mothers, goddesses, whores, daughters, muses, and movie stars—from multiple angles, and through her poems she reveals historical, personal, social, environmental, and artistic viewpoints.
The poems offer layered perspectives fused with multiple versions of female representation, as if to underscore the burden of responsibility, inherited shame, and awesome power that comes with the position women have occupied throughout history. Berger reveals a woman critically wounded—representing the totality of the Western feminine imaginary. Lyrically complex, sometimes surreal, and often ekphrastic in style and content, Interior Femme simultaneously offers heartbreak, laughter, comfort, and empowerment.
The poems offer layered perspectives fused with multiple versions of female representation, as if to underscore the burden of responsibility, inherited shame, and awesome power that comes with the position women have occupied throughout history. Berger reveals a woman critically wounded—representing the totality of the Western feminine imaginary. Lyrically complex, sometimes surreal, and often ekphrastic in style and content, Interior Femme simultaneously offers heartbreak, laughter, comfort, and empowerment.
[more]
Joyful Orphan
Poems
Mark Irwin
University of Nevada Press, 2023
Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful.
Excerpt from “Letter”
Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud
just as when we touch a body or door, or think
of the dead come back, romancing
us through the warp of memory, lighting a way
by luring . . .
[more]
June in Eden
Rosalie Moffett
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Sometimes June in Eden occupies a garden in a wild landscape. Other times, we’re given a terrain where the coveted tree is one that hides a cell tower, where lungs are likened to ATMs and prayers are sent via text message. Rosalie Ruth Moffett’s debut collection of poetry, June in Eden, questions the human task of naming in a time where there are “new kinds of war that keep / changing the maps,” where little mistakes—preying or praying, for instance—are easily made. The heart of this book is an obsession with language, its slippages and power, what to do when faced with the loss of it. “Ruth,” says our speaker, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” There is, throughout this collection, a dark humor, but one that belies a tenderness or wonder, our human need to “love the world / we made and all its shadows.”
Rosalie Moffett’s June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.
Rosalie Moffett’s June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.
[more]
Life in a Field
Poems
Katie Peterson
Omnidawn, 2021
This is a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time.
A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”
A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Introspection, wish, dream, and memory mark this tale, which is set in a location resembling twenty-first-century California—with vistas and orchards threatened by drought and fires. This is also a place of enchantment, a fairy-tale landscape where humans and animals live as equals. As the girl and the donkey grow up, they respond to the difficulties of contemporary civilization, asking a question that meets our existential moment: What do you do with the story you didn’t wish for? A narrator’s voice combines candor with distance, attempting to find a path through our familiar strife, toward a future that feels all but impossible, and into what remains of beauty and pleasure. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”
[more]
Listening through the Bone
Collected Poems
Willy Conley
Gallaudet University Press, 2018
I don’t write "with the ear" as most poets do, but with the eye. As Deaf people are apt to do, we become attuned to our world through tactile means, listening through the bone for vibrations, sensing shifts in air currents, recognizing wafting odors, observing fluctuations and reflections of light and movements in the water.
In Listening through the Bone, Willy Conley bears witness to life’s moments and renders them into poems that are at once irreverent and tender. His poetry examines life cycles, the natural world, and his experiences as a Deaf individual. It is presented in five parts:
In Listening through the Bone, Willy Conley bears witness to life’s moments and renders them into poems that are at once irreverent and tender. His poetry examines life cycles, the natural world, and his experiences as a Deaf individual. It is presented in five parts:
- Inaudibles
- Existentials
- Quizzicals
- Irrevocables
- Environmentals
[more]
Lucky Fish
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Tupelo Press, 2011
Poetry. Asian American Studies. LUCKY FISH travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, "new hope," and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for "my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew," anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet's third collection of poems is her strongest yet.
[more]
Manatee Lagoon
Poems
Jenna Le
Acre Books, 2022
The third full-length collection from physician and poet Jenna Le blends traditional form and the current moment.
In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon.
In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”
Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.
In Manatee Lagoon, sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, villanelles, and a “failed georgic” weave in contemporary subject matter, including social-media comment threads, Pap smears, eclipse glasses, and gun violence. A recurring motif throughout the collection, manatees become a symbol with meanings as wide-ranging as the book itself. Le aligns the genial but vulnerable sea cow with mermaids, neurologists, the month of November, harmful political speech, and even a family photo at the titular lagoon.
In these poems, Le also reflects on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America. The morning after the 2016 election, as three women of color wait for the bus, one says, “In this new world, we must protect each other.”
Manatee Lagoon is a treasury of voices, bringing together the personal and the persona, with poems dedicated to Kate Spade, John Ashbery, and Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. With this book, Le establishes herself as a talented transcriber of the human condition—and as one of the finest writers of formal verse today.
[more]
Midflight
David Corcoran
Four Way Books, 2022
A posthumous collection, Midflight collects the poems written by beloved science editor and journalist David Corcoran in the latter part of his life. Idling in a space between the pastoral and the ordinary, Corcoran’s lyrical world maps the sublime mundanity of nature while exploring memory, dreams, and consciousness itself. Corcoran’s lines abound with figures living and long deceased, with the dead walking onstage as if they never left. Describing the accident that killed his father when he was a toddler in “Here,” Corcoran writes, “the door [opens] in midflight / and [pitches] him out.” In “Last Questions,” he asks, “Are you my brother or / a mockingbird?” While these haunting, vivid poems have an aching prescience, imbued as they are with the awareness of human ephemerality, the gift they proffer, to the writer and the reader at once, is the sense of finding oneself midflight, in midair, betwixt sky and ground, in the free fall of being—going and going and never gone.
[more]
More Poems about Money
Daniel Wolff
Four Way Books, 2022
What do global combat and property ownership have to do with sex and sea turtles? According to Daniel Wolff-as it turns out, everything. More Poems about Money looks at the economic times we live in, from boom to bust, from the suburbs to the warzone, in a voice that ranges from humorous to desperate. Grappling with monetary value and how it infringes on self worth, Wolff asks simultaneously timeless and timely questions-Who has capital, who doesn't, and does that ever change?-in a style both humorous and unflinching, sparing not even himself. "'The market runs on credit," Wolff reminds us, "which romantics call yearning. / A flame. Or a sonnet." Yes, art also participates in capitalism as our lyrics stoke the fire of want, fueling this system and getting snuffed by it. Pivoting from the Great Recession toward today's crisis, this undaunted book illuminates the transactions we aren't supposed to talk about, beckoning us toward the future we can't imagine… yet.
[more]
Mountain Amnesia
Gale Marie Thompson
University Press of Colorado, 2023
In Mountain Amnesia, Thompson’s poems rebuild a new world—and self—in the wake of destruction and loss. Influenced by the landscape of rural Appalachia, these poems depict a nature relentlessly working on its own disappearance for survival. Decaying plants and animal remains are housed in the same world as ramps and bellflowers on the cusp of blooming. These poems do not placate or cover up the inevitability of death, but rather use this knowledge to seek connection and make meaning: “how little and yet / how much it matters to count the dead.” Mountain Amnesia seeks a path through destruction, using ruin to clear the way for new beginnings; or, as Thompson writes, “the painful, florid bloom of passing forward.” This collectionis a testament to survival and resilience, and animal encounters—the lonely fox, the folded fawn, the returning whale, the emerging voles—become new myths along the way.
Mountain Amnesia also explores the question of how implicated or dependent we are on the lives and actions of others. What does it mean to be accountable to and responsible for those around you? How are we implicated in others’ crimes? What can we do in the aftermath? The poems in this collection explore the limits of knowing and seeing, and how we come to be known and seen: “I ask the world for its bandage /of meaning.” Mountain Amnesia both pursues and surrenders to these limits of knowing, narrowing the vast distances between ourselves and others.
Mountain Amnesia also explores the question of how implicated or dependent we are on the lives and actions of others. What does it mean to be accountable to and responsible for those around you? How are we implicated in others’ crimes? What can we do in the aftermath? The poems in this collection explore the limits of knowing and seeing, and how we come to be known and seen: “I ask the world for its bandage /of meaning.” Mountain Amnesia both pursues and surrenders to these limits of knowing, narrowing the vast distances between ourselves and others.
[more]
Mountains Piled upon Mountains
Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene
Jessica Cory
West Virginia University Press, 2019
Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change.
This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia’s boundaries.
[more]
The Mouth of Earth
Poems
Sarah P. Strong
University of Nevada Press, 2020
In this timely and moving collection of poems, Sarah P. Strong explores what it means to live in a world undergoing an irrevocable transformation, the magnitude of which we barely comprehend. A broad range of perspectives shows us different times and places on Earth while unfolding the cyclical nature of human denial and response. A series of linked persona poems about the Dust Bowl recounts the destruction of the Great Plains and how human dreams of plenty destroyed the ancient fertility and stability of the land, how heartbreak and denial contended with bureaucratic insolence. In an imagined view of our planet as it might appear millennia from now, the Earth is "a worry stone / in the pocket of space, or a mood ring / on the finger of a newly minted / god."
The Mouth of Earth serves as both a survival guide for those seeking connection with our planet and one another as well as a compassionate tribute to what we have lost or are losing—the human consequences of such destruction in a time of climate crisis and lost connectivity. Strong’s powerful poems offer us, if not consolation, at least a way toward comprehension in an age of loss, revealing both our ongoing denial of our planet’s fragility and the compelling urgency of our hunger for connection with all life.
The Mouth of Earth serves as both a survival guide for those seeking connection with our planet and one another as well as a compassionate tribute to what we have lost or are losing—the human consequences of such destruction in a time of climate crisis and lost connectivity. Strong’s powerful poems offer us, if not consolation, at least a way toward comprehension in an age of loss, revealing both our ongoing denial of our planet’s fragility and the compelling urgency of our hunger for connection with all life.
[more]
Nest of Matches
Amie Whittemore
Autumn House Press, 2024
Poems that bask in the beauty of nature, queerness, and love while exploring how dichotomies form identity.
Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third collection explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.
Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third collection explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.
[more]
oh orchid o’clock
Endi Bogue Hartigan
Omnidawn, 2023
Poems that break down, expose, and reconsider our notions of time.
This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective time, with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. She considers how can we be both captured and complicit within systems of measurement, and she invites us to imagine how to break from, create, or become immune to them. Her poems use language to expose the face of the clock to reveal how gears press against interconnecting systems—economic, capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, and fantastical.
This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective time, with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. She considers how can we be both captured and complicit within systems of measurement, and she invites us to imagine how to break from, create, or become immune to them. Her poems use language to expose the face of the clock to reveal how gears press against interconnecting systems—economic, capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, and fantastical.
[more]
On Certainty
Karla Kelsey
Omnidawn, 2023
Lyrical poems that tell the story of a nameless woman navigating a technological dystopia.
In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.
Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.
In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.
Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.
[more]
Once When Green
Poems
Mark Irwin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025
“We breathe, and then / vanish,” proclaims a speaker in Once When Green, a new collection by accomplished poet Mark Irwin. While deeply personal, the book engages the earth, “gulls, / gray, quarreling air, their ha-ha-ha-ing at our trace / of garbage and carbon,” and addresses mortality as well as the consequences of global warming—how it impacts humans, animals, and the plant life that sustains us all. Poems here accent the lateness of our attempt to control pollution, while interrogating the natural world through myth and the voicings of different creatures, beings displaced or relegated to other spaces, including apes, birds, and an arcade bear that reflects: “I once thought that was freedom— / but how in a receding wilderness no longer mine?”
Sighting those areas where metropolis and wilderness collide, Irwin conveys the tension between the natural and digital world as a speaker laments: “I am so lonely for a river’s one rushing / minute with scuttling crayfish, nymphs, and eddies blurring clouds, not its / imagined thousand pixels changing colors toward forms / on a screen.” These poems remind us how forms of the spirit cannot be bound by technology and capitalism, imploring “how to become explorers, cartographers / again.”
[more]
Only
Rebecca Foust
Four Way Books, 2022
Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust's Only insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, "Null. All. What's after death or before." This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: "I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go."
[more]
Ore Choir
The Lava on Iceland
Katy Didden
Tupelo Press, 2022
Part miracle, part oracle, in these poems lava speaks “with the focus of a burning glass,” lighting lyric core samples through geo-historical and cultural texts about Iceland. Shifting the ground so “nouns are never still,” the lava reveals how language itself is a record of collisions: poem as matter, sound as forge, form as friction. And what does it mean to be human in the face of such ancient forces, especially as climate change unsettles the earth that anchors us? By the light of the “sphere’s credo,” can we, too, be remade?
[more]
Our Portion
New and Selected Poems
Philip Terman
Autumn House Press, 2015
The new and selected collection of Philip Terman's illustrates the poet's deep understanding and compassion for our world. Spanning 20 years of poetry, this collection of poems focuses on themes of nature, literature, family, and Judaism.
[more]
Phyla of Joy
Karen An-hwei Lee
Tupelo Press, 2012
“Karen An-hwei Lee’s third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity’s essential components: memory, spirituality, emotion, thought….Contemplative and linguistically sophisticated,Phyla of Joy is simply exquisite —‘ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.’” — Rigoberto González
There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.
In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.
There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.
In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.
[more]
Practicing the Truth
Ellery Akers
Autumn House Press, 2015
Winner of the 2014 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, selected by Alicia Ostriker. Akers' collection of lyric poems celebrates our everyday world while not glossing over the pain suffered by those who inhabit it. These beautifully crafted, quiet poems are simultaneously powerful to read.
[more]
Queer Nature
A Poetry Anthology
Edited by Michael Walsh
Autumn House Press, 2022
An anthology of queer nature poetry spanning three centuries.
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is “concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies and identities . . . Queer Nature remains interested in elements, flora, fauna, habitats, homes, and natural forces—literary aspects of the work that allow queer and trans people to speak within their specific cultural and literary histories of the abnormal, the animal, the elemental, and the unnatural.” The anthology features poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Diaz, and June Jordan, as well as emerging voices such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain, Eric Tran, and Jim Whiteside.
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is “concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies and identities . . . Queer Nature remains interested in elements, flora, fauna, habitats, homes, and natural forces—literary aspects of the work that allow queer and trans people to speak within their specific cultural and literary histories of the abnormal, the animal, the elemental, and the unnatural.” The anthology features poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Blanco, Kay Ryan, Jericho Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Natalie Diaz, and June Jordan, as well as emerging voices such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain, Eric Tran, and Jim Whiteside.
[more]
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter
Poems
H. G. Dierdorff
University of Nevada Press, 2024
2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.
“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal.
A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.
“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal.
A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.
[more]
Rebel Poet
More Stories from a 21st Century Indian
Louis V. Clark (Two Shoes)
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.
[more]
Refugia
Poems
Kyce Bello
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
[more]
Riddle Field
Poems
Derek Thomas Dew
University of Nevada Press, 2020
Winner of the 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize
"Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry." —Publisher's Weekly
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew’s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored.
Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
"Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry." —Publisher's Weekly
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew’s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored.
Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
[more]
rivers of the driftless region
Mark Conway
Four Way Books, 2019
Conway’s spare, imagistic poems concern the implications of eternity: which offers no past or future but rather an ever-present now.
[more]
The Sonoran Desert
A Literary Field Guide
Edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos, Illustrations by Paul Mirocha
University of Arizona Press, 2016
A land of austerity and bounty, the Sonoran Desert is a place that captures imaginations and hearts. It is a place where barbs snag, thorns prick, and claws scratch. A place where lizards scramble and pause, hawks hunt like wolves, and bobcats skulk in creosote.
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world’s most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book’s editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that melds art and science. It captures the stunning biodiversity of the world’s most verdant desert through words and images. More than fifty poets and writers—including Christopher Cokinos, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ken Lamberton, Eric Magrane, Jane Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Alberto Ríos, Ofelia Zepeda, and many others—have composed responses to key species of this striking desert. Each creative contribution is joined by an illustration by award-winning artist Paul Mirocha and scientific information about the creature or plant authored by the book’s editors.
From the saguaro to the mountain lion, from the black-tailed jackrabbit to the mesquite, the species represented here have evoked compelling and creative responses from each contributor. Just as writers such as Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy have memorialized the desert, this collection is sure to become a new classic, offering up the next generation of voices of this special and beautiful place, the Sonoran Desert.
[more]
The Stone Circle Poems
The Collected Poems of Terry Wooten
Terry Wooten
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2015
Collected poems of a Midwest naturalist-bard. A lifetime retrospective of poems written and spoken from memory by Terry Wooten, poet and creator of Michigan’ Stone Circle poetry recitation venue.
[more]
A Sybil Society
Poems
Katherine Factor
University of Nevada Press, 2022
With fearless and playful language, Katherine Factor’s debut collection reveals agony, humor, and the necessary voices of the female oracle through time. The oracle’s message is apparent—she is not dead. Her words are cryptic but contemporary, offering caution along with guidance to a society interested only in using prophecy for profit.
In a time when only a select few are prosperous, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth. The collection is fearless in the face of convention and gives readers a sense of devastating sorrow in a world gone mad.
In a time when only a select few are prosperous, A Sybil Society paints a portrait of the present moment and unveils a restless truth. The collection is fearless in the face of convention and gives readers a sense of devastating sorrow in a world gone mad.
[more]
The Table
Seasons on a Colorado Ranch
Lara Richardson
University Press of Colorado, 2024
Welcome to The Table where stories of family and faith run deep in ranching tradition. Join Colorado rancher and mother of five, Lara Richardson, as she reveals the complexities of modern frontier life in a picturesque Rocky Mountain valley. She shares seasons of growth and loss in her family and community while exploring the stewardship of land, body, and soul. Richardson lays bare the deep moments of injury, mystery, and death while giving readers a glimpse into the daily demands and generous gifts of a livelihood that is becoming scarcer with each passing year. With her hands in the soil and her heart on each page, Richardson offers recipes for your own table while inviting you to sit a while at hers.
[more]
TechnoRage
Poems
William Olsen
Northwestern University Press, 2017
William Olsen's TechnoRage is a meditative ode to nature. Its intensely lyrical poems remind us of our humanity, spinning free-ranging poetic conversations that question the ways of the world. In the age of the wide but often shallow lens of our new technology, Olsen takes a nod from Robert Frost and Gary Snyder, laying bare our need to return to the roots of things, where these poems find their voice. Olsen revels in language that is an intensely authentic rumination on our human isolation.
[more]
Tell it Slant
John Yau
Omnidawn, 2023
Poems that consider doubleness and truth-telling through the voice of an Asian American poet, while referencing a range of writers and pop culture figures.
Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant” can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address—as place, as person, as memory, and as event —Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,” among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.
Emily Dickinson begins one of her poems with the oft-quoted line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant." For Asian Americans, the word “slant” can be heard and read two ways, as both a racializing and an obscuring term. It is this sense of doubleness—culminating in the instability of language and an untrustworthy narrator—that shapes, informs, and inflects the poems in John Yau’s new collection, all of which focus on the questions of who is speaking and who is being spoken for and to. Made up of eight sections, each exploring the idea of address—as place, as person, as memory, and as event —Tell It Slant does as Dickinson commands, but with a further twist. Yau summons spirits who help the author “tell all the truth,” among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Philip K. Dick, Li Shangyin, and Elsa Lanchester.
[more]
A Theory of Birds
Poems
Zaina Alsous
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest
a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside
the woman a lake of funerals
This layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds—particularly extinct species—become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.
Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems—their subjects and their logics—refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.
[more]
Under the Broom Tree
Natalie Homer
Autumn House Press, 2021
Poems that explore the wilderness in order to find rest and divine providence.
In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol for shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal.
Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s debut poetry collection is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, “Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.” Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.
In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol for shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal.
Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s debut poetry collection is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, “Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.” Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.
[more]
Under the Broom Tree
Natalie Homer
Autumn House Press, 2021
Poems that explore the wilderness in order to find rest and divine providence.
In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol for shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal.
Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s debut poetry collection is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, “Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.” Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.
In the story of the prophet Elijah, he must flee his home, and, after an arduous journey, he arrives under a broom tree, where he prays for his own death. But in his sleep, he is touched by an angel who provides food and water. In this moment, the broom tree becomes a symbol for shelter in a barren landscape, a portent of hope and renewal.
Drawing inspiration from this tale, Natalie Homer’s debut poetry collection is a trek through the wildernesses of the heart and of the natural world. Exploring the idea of divine providence, Homer finds seams of light opening between forlorn moments and locates, “Something to run a finger through, / something to shine in the ocher light.” Within these narrow spaces, Homer explores themes of longing, home, family, and self-worth amidst the wondrous backdrop of the American West and the Rust Belt, while integrating a rich mythology of narrative, image, and association. The broom tree, offering the capacity for shade and respite, becomes a source of connection and an inspiration for the collection. It is an invitation to sink deep into the earth and self and feel the roots entwine.
[more]
The Upstate
Lindsay Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Poetry that sings of southern Appalachian beauty and crisis.
Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, Queen Anne’s lace on the roadsides, and toxic chemicals in the watershed, Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate is a book about southern Appalachia in a contemporary moment of change and development. Layering a personal lyric voice with a broader awareness of labor issues and political and ecological crises, The Upstate redefines a regional poetics as one attuned to national and global systems. These poems observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation and raging in their own quiet way against their continuation.
The poems in The Upstate arise from moments of darkness and desperation, mobilizing a critical intelligence against the status quo of place and history, all while fiercely upholding belief in the role of poetry to affect these conditions. Turner’s poems weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield them from destruction and to profess faith in the delicate beauties of the world at hand.
Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, Queen Anne’s lace on the roadsides, and toxic chemicals in the watershed, Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate is a book about southern Appalachia in a contemporary moment of change and development. Layering a personal lyric voice with a broader awareness of labor issues and political and ecological crises, The Upstate redefines a regional poetics as one attuned to national and global systems. These poems observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation and raging in their own quiet way against their continuation.
The poems in The Upstate arise from moments of darkness and desperation, mobilizing a critical intelligence against the status quo of place and history, all while fiercely upholding belief in the role of poetry to affect these conditions. Turner’s poems weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield them from destruction and to profess faith in the delicate beauties of the world at hand.
[more]
The Way of the Earth
Poems
Matthew Shenoda
Northwestern University Press, 2022
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.”
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.”
[more]
Whale Aria
Rajiv Mohabir
Four Way Books
“For seasons I was faceless // trying to swallow constellations, / to roll a star-map on my tongue,” recounts Rajiv Mohabir’s speaker in “Boy with Baleen for Teeth.” As formally visionary and acoustically attuned as ever, Mohabir has composed an interspecies opera in Whale Aria. This collection examines the humpback whale as a zoomorphic analog of the queer, brown, migratory speaker breaching these pages; just as a person navigates postcolonial queerness across geopolitical boundaries, traveling from India to Guyana to London to New York to Honolulu, these singular cetaceans wander through disparate waters. Undersea, whales call to one another through their marine music, and, using the documented structure of humpback vocalizations, Mohabir translates the syntax of their songs into poetry. In our search for meaning, in our call and response, kinship resonates; “the echo is amniotic.” “Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you’ve called / since childhood.” Fluid and inexorable as the ocean, Whale Aria articulates the confluence of ecological fate and human history. In “Why Whales Are Back in New York City,” Mohabir notes the coincidence of current events: humpback migration returns to Queens for the first time in a century while the state expedites deportations of undocumented people in the same burrough. The language shared by human and marine creatures in these poems, however, promise that the tides will turn. “Our songs will pierce the dark / fathoms,” Mohabir underscores the eternity of water. “Behold the miracle: // what was once lost / now leaps before you.”
[more]
What Shines
Sydney Lea
Four Way Books
Retrospective of a long life and already inimitable career in poetry, Sydney Lea’s What Shines asserts and asks in equal measure. In older age, Lea affirms the luster of fruit long labored for: a resilient and happy marriage; the rewards of parenthood and, later, grandchildren; a profound intimacy with northern New England — the environment, the seasons, the people, home, time. But he also transmits the escalating urgency of answering the fundamental question: at this late hour, what light do we have to see by? What light will outlast us? In “1949,” Lea revisits old photographs: one of his parents “both grinning straight at the Kodak, / an elm, not yet blighted to death, at their backs,” another of his mother standing beside a bucket of sunfish. “With what I’ve known, you’d think there’d be chapter on chapter,” he says, everything habitual, familiar. Still he stumbles upon revelation, the visceral novelty of experience, and Lea’s brilliant shock glimmers in the golden hour. “I shouldn’t be,” he disclaims, “and yet somehow I’m stunned: / Even the fish in that yellowed photo are young.” Despite the accelerating onset of autumn, consolations line the path “at the edge / of our late-shorn meadow,” where there lie blackberries that “should have vanished by now.” And so what if a handful will not disarm winter? “Though tiny and poor, it's sweet, / the fruit, even more so / than when I found more.” If we receive this allotment of days once and only once, Lea’s consummate collection urges us to remember the spirit of the lyric itself: although we couldn’t keep it all forever, when we had it, my God, so much of it was sweet.
[more]
Where Are the Trees Going?
Vénus Khoury-Ghata Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Bringing the work of acclaimed poet Venus Khoury-Ghata to a new generation of anglophone readers, renowned award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has rendered Khoury-Gata's highly praised collection Où vont les arbres? into unforgettable English verse. In it, Khoury-Ghata takes on perennial themes of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict. Characters take root in her memory as weathered trees and garden plants, lending grit and body to the imaginative collection. As bracing as the turn of seasons, Where Are the Trees Going? highlights a poet writing with renewed urgency and maturity.
Khoury-Ghata's collection has been translated into fifteen languages. In this special edition, Paris-resident Hacker has also included selections from Khoury-Ghata's short fiction collection La maison aux orties (The House of Nettles). The resulting interplay illuminates the poet’s contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.
[more]
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