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Poems written outdoors, in the presence of disappearing glaciers—a book of memory, grief, and transformation.

In her new poetry collection, Memory of a Larger Mind, Daniela Naomi Molnar sifts through memory and layered loss—planetary, cultural, familial, and personal—asking how we withstand and how we transform. These are plein air poems, written outdoors in the presence of disappearing glaciers and composed with shifting light, wind, sound, and scent: elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments. Braiding the slow death of glaciers with her grandmother's survival of the Holocaust, the book holds ecological and ancestral loss in a single frame. Alive to our current moment while keeping one foot in geologic time, Molnar exposes genocide and ecocide as expressions of the same logic, the same movement: ice to water to light, grief to love to joy to grief.

Memory of a Larger Mind is part of a larger interdisciplinary project that gathers pigments, language, and memory from “sacrifice zones”—glaciated landscapes, former concentration and incarceration camps, desecrated sacred sites—and transforms them into poems, paintings, and films. The result is work in which all bodies are understood as dynamic, part of a world in which difficult pasts might open toward more peaceful futures, and in which grief, handled with care, might shift to love.

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.

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.