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.
 

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.

A new and singular translation of an award-winning author and poet
 
Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s 2017 Brage Prize–nominated poetry collection and when the light comes it will be so fantastic weaves together themes of ecological and linguistic loss, memory and deep time, and motherhood and grief. Berget’s poetics point to landscapes used as sites of extraction, where exhausted phosphorus, starving clay layers, and forest machines are encountered. The poems in this collection traverse forests, deserts, and seas—their poetic matter separated by fields of caesuras, visual absences suggestive of Earth’s ongoing extinctions. As jurors of the Brage Prize commented, within these pages is a universe where humans can seldom be separated from one another or from the nature they live in and among. Berget’s first book translated into English is an innovative exploration of the climate crises we are living with today and the complex emotions that ebb and flow along with it.

"The connection is not so much in mutual influence, though there is some of that, but in each writer’s total immersion in place. Even those writers who no longer live in the state remember the feel, the physical texture, the overwhelming and enfolding vegetal surround of the place." Editor, Irene McKinney

This seventh collection by acclaimed poet Susan Stewart offers a meditation on difficulty and the powers of nature.
 
In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle that comes with living in time and searching beyond appearances. The rough thicket presents impediments, yet it also bears fruit and delicate flowers.
 
With Bramble, Susan Stewart has composed a book of many forms, including satires, elegies, meditations, and songs. Bramble is also an exploration of the act of making such forms. The book’s three sections—“Mirror,” “Briar,” and “Channel”—link lyric time to our lives as they are situated in history and nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.
 

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.

Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Her new collection, Burnt Mountain, is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Fiercely attuned to the match and mismatch between mind and mountain—the ways in which the natural and the human construct and deconstruct each other in the contested realms of art, wilderness, history, devotion, and politics—Wilson’s poetics reckon with resistant forces of nature and with the human drive to subdue what eludes us. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being—“that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown”—and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood—and what can sustain us.

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.”

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.”

A kaleidoscopic literary exploration of extinction and conservation, inspired by the latest scientific research

Creature Needs is a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat loss that harnesses the power of literature and scientific research to move us, and stir our hearts and minds, toward action and change. A collection of new literary works by prominent writers paired with excerpts from recent scientific articles that inspired and informed them, this innovative anthology engages the collaborative, cross-disciplinary spirit and energy that is necessary to address the impact of humans on all other animals on our planet.

Divided into six sections representing the basic needs for survival—air, food, water, shelter, room to move, and each other—the stories and poems in Creature Needs vividly portray how these essential conditions are under assault through climate change, habitat loss, plastic and industrial pollution, and human intervention in natural landscapes. As the dominant species on Earth, humans not only control access to survival resources but we also overconsume and harm them. Rather than surrender to despair, the writers here believe that we have the power, if we choose, to change course and protect these resources.

A collaboration with the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve, Creature Needs is a path-setting fusion of literary art and scientific research that deepens our understanding of the interdependence between life and habitat, illuminating the stark choices we face to conserve resources and ensure that the basic needs of all species are met.

Contributors: Kazim Ali, Mary-Kim Arnold, Ramona Ausubel, David Baker, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, Kimberly Blaeser, Oni Buchanan, Tina Cane, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Thalia Field, Ben Goldfarb, Annie Hartnett, Sean Hill, Hester Kaplan, Donika Kelly, Robin McLean, Miranda Mellis, Rajiv Mohabir, Kyoko Mori, David Naimon, Craig Santos Perez, Beth Piatote, Rena Priest, Alberto Ríos, Eléna Rivera, Sofia Samatar, Sharma Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Maggie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Tim Sutton, Jodie Noel Vinson, Asiya Wadud, Claire Wahmanholm, Marco Wilkinson, Jane Wong.

War and its reverberations propel people across the Nigerian landscape in Hussain Ahmed’s third collection

In Crossroad Mirror many poems begin after sundown—in quiet moments when the bounds between the past and the present, the living and the dead, blur.  War and its aftershocks often form the backdrop for these scenes, though Ahmed’s verse rarely brings us to the battlefield itself. Instead, we hear the stories of refugees, civilian casualties, and ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of their circumstances. “There’s no vocabulary in the army—for grief, or death,” writes Ahmed. “Each door you exit, leads to another parade ground.” A group of soldiers wait out a rainstorm—and the war—together in a tent. Their families linger by the radio and listen for news. The “missing” loom as large as the dead.

Tracing the threads of migration that war so often catalyzes, Crossroad Mirror takes us from grassland to cornfield to coastline and explores the role storytelling and spirituality play in leaving and grieving. 

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend's illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person's sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.

Describing a trip to Japan, Tuckner evokes the brute force of appetite alongside the delicacy of life as he recalls "memories of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl / of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch." Beholden to a ticking clock, we catalogue, becoming evidentiary and encyclopedic in our impulses. "We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts: / sixteen photographs of a single puddle // taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom." In borrowing the title of Edward Gibbon's seminal 6-volume history, Tuckner anchors the associative detours of his sprawling intellect and executes a stunning metacommentary on his own lyrics: time collapses every era into a spattering of sentences, tyrannical as it forcibly converts the present to the past, and yet the barbarous recursion of human feeling resists oblivion, evoking the eternity of emotional significance. Tuckner's shrewd balance of irony and tenderness make this cerebral inversion possible: this friendship is the poet's canon event, the Rome at which every road in his mind arrives, and yet it is also the singular dialect that will not cede to death's subsuming lingua franca.

Damien Hirst's taxidermy art, The John Keats House, superfund sites in Rome, NY, the 2023 Ohio Train Derailment, a children's book titled Oil Spill! — these poems travel widely in their topics to understand the specific ravages of disease on the human body, and in turn, the ravages of human beings on the planet. Its trenchant criticism isn't pessimistic, though — its redemption is the restorative, unending love that made these elegies possible. Equally gutted and mesmerized by our infinite, arbitrary ability to discern meaning in mess, these poems ask us to bear witness to what we can develop if we will sit in the darkness. To read the photo essay of a storm's aftermath. It tells an ancient story that becomes brand new, the one about "a puddle you glimpsed the moon in & stopped for. // A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell."

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.

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.

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.

The stunning classic from the 6th Illinois Poet Laureate

Everything this poet touches is volatile—the poet himself, the people and world around him, ideas and mythologies, the ghosts of memory and the dream of possible futures, all seem to burst into fragments. Mark Turcotte uses poetry to gather up the pieces—the shards of joy and grief, peace and doubt, strength and temptation, questions and answers—as he tries to define and rediscover what is lost when everyday life becomes explosive.

A collection that combines fixed poetic forms with long-form meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. 

Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.

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.

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.
 

Meditations on time, motherhood, and the ordinary beauty of everyday life

Like a newborn’s patterns of sleeping and waking, the revelations of motherhood don’t follow a reasonable schedule, and there’s no clocking out. Organized around the hours of the day, Foxes for Everybody gives voice to the marvels, fears, absurdities, and astonishments of parenthood. These essays offer twenty-four glimpses into how we experience time, our families, our planet, and all of those small moments that aren’t small at all. In memories and reflections that weave through tornadoes and jellyfish, cemeteries and carousels, mortality, mental health, and the exquisite gift of a perfect sentence, acclaimed writer Catherine Pierce reminds us that fear and joy can and do live side by side, and urges us to stay awake—even when, especially when, we’re at the brink of exhaustion—to the possibility of wonder.

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.
 

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.
 

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. 

I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present. Poised between reveries and ruins, the book traverses several layers: the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe’s mother’s home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake, in conversation with the oldest tree alive. These channeled non-human voices, both whimsical and uncanny, animate more recent landscapes—such as Dalarna’s nearby seventeenth-century copper mine, now closed, along with a fantastical modern ice hotel in a state of meltdown. The landmarks of loss are sometimes dizzy-making as McCabe celebrates her childhood pantheism and queer development in West Hollywood, mourns dead relatives and lost habitats, and confronts her masculine lineage, blotted out through grief, addiction, and war. I Woke a Lake holds up an invisible telephone connecting recurrent locales, among them, blasted orchards, the Veterans’ Cemetery, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home in Great Village, grieving parties, and a cryopreservation site. These different layers reverberate with each other, taking on a haunted and haunting music, reaching toward an otherworldly, tender overhearing. 
 

Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Expansive in scope, Niu refits the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” propelling readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.

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.
 

A high-lyric historian of the human project, Laura Cresté fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies while recording the singular details of our individual lives and most intimate relationships—their intricate embroidery, characterizing stains, and fraying hems. In the Good Years confronts a painful family legacy, returning to the violent artistic censorship of Argentina's military dictatorship, her relatives' survival of a Dirty War death camp, and the scattered paths of their migration to safer ground. In reconstructing the past, Cresté resists the individualistic contraction of the coming of age model, not merely solidifying the psychological actualization of a single person as they enter adulthood but discursively expanding the notion of self, discovering the boundaries of identity as they overlay the seams of the broader world. These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence even as they touch on seemingly unrelated and often ordinary things: a roast chicken recipe, an aunt's questionable romantic advice, flea-ridden dogs, high school parties, waitressing at a dive bar, drowned newts in the swimming pool, unruly tomato plants, horseback riding. "Once saddled across a mare / named Ramona, I was afraid of the burden of my body," Cresté writes, fearful "that she would buckle—an animal once ridden into war." The sheer brilliance of this book's poetics manifest in lines like these, which bring political, personal, and ecological considerations to bear on the concept of weight in the space of a single sentence. What is the heft of a life that was nearly disappeared? How does a number become a weapon to enforce the gendered economy graphing desirability against power? What is the size of our footprint on this planet, and how heavy must our presence currently be as the animals and the land reach their breaking point? How much do you weigh? How much weight can you carry? "I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin," Cresté admits. "Now I know no one feels free, // not even the creature who devoured / the countryside, ravenous for the time / we were allowed in the field." This stunning debut champions that ravening, relishes the external and internal wilderness of the surrounding environment and our own human nature, and honors appetite as an opportunity to savor each bite for as long as we get to sit at the table. Throughout, these poems keenly subvert experience and memory, asking how we will remember this moment, and if the blessing of being here means we are somehow, even now in all the present's suffering, living in the good years.

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.


 

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 . . .

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.”

The Long Now Conditions Permit confronts the persistent brutalities of our world through poetry that both names and resists the injustices shaping it. From the quiet sorrows of everyday slight to the overwhelming crises of ecological collapse and gendered violence, these poems document what is occurring—the horrendous and the intimate, the anguished and the magnificent.

With ethical attention, Jami Macarty’s collection engages the political, ecological, and personal forces that shape and mark our lives, offering an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Each poem meditates on power, insists on articulating what is being lost—and what must be saved and reclaimed. 

Amid the exploitation and violence, these poems find moments of grace: the scent of a sea rose, a desert walk in spring, the company of birds, Earth entire. The Long Now Conditions Permit is both tender elegy and urgent call, exhorting readers to grapple with the devastating failings of humanity and the saving possibilities of love. 

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.

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.

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.
 

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.  

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.

An award-winning poet writing through violence, solace, and hope

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in Our Mouths illuminates how we are all enmeshed in a web of violence and love. As the speaker of the collection drives cross-country to visit her family of origin in Tennessee, she reckons with the tensions between her current and past selves and the many ways violence—interpersonal, societal, and environmental—has shaped her life. She struggles to find meaning, questioning the ethics of locating faith in a natural world she is unintentionally destroying, and grapples with her complicity in systems of power and oppression as a white Southern woman. Ultimately, she rejects the idea of genetic family as a place of solace; instead, she cleaves to the liberation and joy of connections forged outside those strictures, where intimacy is freely chosen rather than preordained.

An urgent exploration of caring and mothering on a planet in crisis
 
In a swell of sea-linked essays, Christina Rivera explores the kinship between marine animals, humans, and Earth’s blue womb. Rivera’s investigative questions begin with the toxic burden of her body and spiral out—to a grieving orca, a hunted manta ray, a pregnant sea turtle, a spawning salmon, an “endling” porpoise, and the “mother culture” of sperm whales—as she redefines what it means to mother and defend a collective future.

Braiding memoir with embodied climate science, Rivera challenges that it’s not anthropomorphism to feel deep connection to nonhuman species and proposes that gathering in collective grief is essential amid the sixth mass extinction. For ecofeminists, fans of Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams—and for anyone who feels themself disintegrate in the presence of the sea—My Oceans offers a timely and wondrous descent into the deep waters of interconnection in which we swim.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven incantations—prayers, hexes, and charms—all of which call for a transformation of language, grief, and the self.

“Good things come to you through fire,” a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with one loss after another? Then she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until activated by fire. Enter mycelia and a teeming underground world that metabolizes death, changing what remains so that life can begin anew.

Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems—prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations—that call for transformation. A parent’s death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms—including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle—empowers these shifts.

Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, “Underpoem [Fire Fungus],” sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, “Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.

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.
 

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.

“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.” 

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."

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.
 

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.
 

Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, Seabeast lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things.

Mohabir's language ingeniously plumbs the depths, illustrating how the objectification fundamental to the construction and preservation of animal taxonomy mirrors the internecine violence of humankind on both a broad and intimate scale. "We were misnamed / again and again: first Hindu, / then Hindoo, then Indian, then / Coolie, all subhuman / much like this precursory cetacean / of the Eocene, named / in Latin great lizard— / anguilliform, what to make / of twist and tear, teeth / gnashing sharks and durodons / into pulp, judged by fossilized / gouges in enamel and finger / holes on skulls?"

Through the invention of race, the conquest and consumption of land, and the cultural amnesia enforced on the subaltern, imperialism threatens human survival on this planet just as we have misunderstood, taken captive, and hunted whales nearly to extinction. Meditating on the results of genetic testing, Mohabir details how, like his white ex-spouse's "ancestors / from northern Germany / played bone flutes / for their dead at gravesites," a lab "one day exhumed" them all "in perfect pentatonic scales." Meanwhile, he wonders what of his Indo-Caribbean heritage, complicated by the obfuscating forces of indenture, ethnic oppression, and frequent relocation, "can be revived" from this "wastebasket taxon, / us unnamed hoard of no future?" Of the Irrawaddy Dolphin once "known for / herding shoals of fish / for fisherfolk / in whose nets / they now drown," Mohabir observes that "learning human / language opens you // to betrayal." "Trust me," he urges, "though I am no // hairless dolphin— / I once had a husband." Standing at the confluence of these prehistoric, mythological, and contemporary tributaries feeding our attitude toward whales, Mohabir asks, who is the seabeast, really? The namer or the named? The answer prompts us to see that, if we recognize the legacy of human barbarism in the whale's long history with us, we can also locate a new reserve of resilience and survival. It is their example Mohabir uses, not the "bright honey" of their blubber that once would "fuel lanterns," to power his own spiritual refortification. "Maybe I will, from filling my lungs, blood / rushing to my core, / into a finned thing, / transform."

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

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.

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. 
 

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.
 

This unflinching poetry collection follows the author’s diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
 
In her masterful poetry collection Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano confronts the reality of mortality with gorgeous attention to imagery and scene. The book follows a trajectory from early symptoms before diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to full-blown illness and its effects on friends and family, including her children, who appear in poems like “After Dropping My Son Off at College” and “My Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant.”

With a devoted naturalist’s eye, Silano revels in birds, trees, and flowers in a way that reminds readers we are connected to the world around us. The book touches on the medical, the metaphysical, and even the cosmological (through encounters in medical offices and on a moon of Mars). With Nutter Butters and Lorna Doones, abecedarians and self-elegies, Silano’s singular, feisty, contemporary voice propels these poems of grief and acceptance as they explore the transformational power of art.

When I Learn Catastrophically

is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
When I learn I probably have a couple years,
maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzles
begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair
of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart.
The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic
things that winter I shimmy between science
& song, between widgeons & windows, weather
& its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomes
my lose less, my less morsels, my lose smile
while more sore looms. . . .

A debut essay collection that upends our notions of loneliness, wilderness, and liberation

Transanything reveals a world in metamorphosis. A hermit crab retires its shell, lovers drift apart, and seasons churn, all amid Ever Jones’s own narrative of midlife gender transition.
 
Jones takes up a tradition of writing—about the American landscape, solitude, wilderness, and the West—long intertwined with colonialism and heteropatriarchy, and makes it wholly their own. A self-proclaimed “nature essay” misbehaves, wandering away from the hummingbird outside Jones’s window. In their chronicle of a week in Yellowstone, Jones navigates trails frequented by grizzlies and a campground where their identity is regarded as equally dangerous. Elk, bison, and bark spiders roam this book’s pages, but it is the gray wolf—the embattled apex predator of the American West, narrow survivor of settler colonial violence, and vessel for American myths of independence—who emerges as Jones’s shapeshifting coprotagonist.
 
Taking on a global web of colonial systems that seek to divide us, Jones disrupts loneliness and forges space for queerness and transness to be aliveness—to be transanything.

A luminous poetry collection that weaves together nature, family ties, and memory
 
Born from a state of fragmented time, the poems in The Unreliable Tree call out the intimate feelings mothers so often fear to share. With a precise and tender eye, Margot Kahn tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. As she chronicles the changes in her marriage, her friendships, and her own shifting identity, Kahn questions the risks we take for devotion and the labors we devote to love. These poems shine a light on the patience and perseverance required to care—for homes, for people, for heritage—and ultimately question the choices we make: to hold on to others around us, and to hold on to ourselves. Compassionate, unflinching, lyric, and raw, The Unreliable Tree portrays the world of early motherhood with humility and complicated beauty.

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.
 

Voices from the Meadow of the Mind of the Wandering Spirit is a collection of poems over a life infused with the experiences, biases, and meanderings of a child of nature, growing up among Minnesota lakes and swamps, and going on to immerse himself in studies of the majestic Great Lakes for 40 years. The poems delve into the mysteries and lessons that our fellow plants and animals provide and often probes the role of humanity in causing extinctions and climate-change catastrophes. One person’s exploration of nature and humanity, this collection considers what it would be like to fly through the universe unimpeded and see first-hand, the black holes, stars, planets, and galaxies it holds.

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.”

“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.” 
 

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.

A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday

Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany’s Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island’s dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: “maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.”

In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: “The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves.” This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.

A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday

Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany’s Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island’s dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: “maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.”

In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: “The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves.” This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.