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 for 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.
 

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

Stephanie Berger’s debut poetry collection, Interior Femme, cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside.” In a sequence of poems that present variations on the Western feminine archetype and explore the experience of femininity today, 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, ontological, social, environmental, literary, 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.

At the center of the book is Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses, who is crumbling under the terrific burden of remembering. In these poems, there is a woman critically wounded—representing the totality of the Western feminine imaginary—who is seeking answers to dire questions. 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 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.

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.
 

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.

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."

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.
 

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.
 

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.

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

“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.