Uncomfortable Ecologies is a book of poems by Elizabeth Joy Levinson exploring the details of this world we live on. It's a book about relationships with each other, with family, sisters, all the creatures on the earth. She brings her poet's sensibility and biologist's knowledge to each poem. This book is a journey by land and by sea.
No ecological system is without conflict. Uncomfortable Ecologies is an exploration of relationships and their tenuous nature. Levinson explores the domestic and wild, the macro and the micro, the familiar and the other, the objective and the confessional. These poems seek to uncover vulnerabilities within ecologies as a bridge to a new level of understanding and intimacy.
The speaker parallels the irreparable losses faced in our environment due to habitat destruction and climate change with the challenges of families facing poverty and addiction. Trees shatter in extreme weather, oceans rinse a family of their dreams, wolves protect one another by…
I really loved this book. The emotions are raw but the images are so precise. I love Turner's use of repetition in the poems--in "The Bodies," "Horses," "Lovers." "My Mother Disappearing" reminded me of my mother. I felt like I was right there with him as I immersed myself in his poetry. His poems remind me of Pablo Neruda, especially his early poems from Residencia en La Terra, the first and second volumes, the ones translated by Merwin in particular. They have the same raw emotional energy.
Following the loose series of Turner’s other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this “collection” serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in. The Dead Peasant’s Handbook begins with the difficulty and hardship of living in the world after losing a loved one before allowing oneself to gravitate again towards delight and wonder. With deep dives into history, the poems traverse the wild terrain of our lives, and it remains ever-constant to the theme at the core of all three recent books―that…
Gathering Broken Light was written in response to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. The poems move quickly from one to the next, telling a story of horror and redemption both. The human cost, the spiritual cost of gun violence is rendered in exquisitely painful detail. Everyone should read this.
Gathering Broken Light confronts pasts we cannot understand, largely following the October 2017 mass shooting. Anchored in the severity and the beauty of the Mojave Desert landscape, fractured narratives, surrealist repetition, and imagistic lyricism work to contemplate grief, including both overwhelming sorrow and deep love. A voice yearns, "I wish I could sing the sky to you."
In a collection that refuses to flatten the horrors of gun violence, both "flashing restless anger" and immense sadness, acknowledging that grief never leaves entirely, these poems also offer small comforts, even hope, as the "century plants continue to bloom // slowly, like…
LeeAnn Pickrell’s love affair with punctuation began in a tenth-grade English class.
Punctuated is a playful book of punctuation poems inspired by her years as an editor. Frustrated by the misuse of the semicolon, she wrote a poem to illustrate its correct use. From there she realized the other marks of punctuation had troubled her as well …
In art and photography, images reflect emotions and ideas. These poems explore the idea of a poem as an image. Each poem in this collection is not only about the mark of punctuation; it also looks like the mark of punctuation, so a period looks like a period, a question mark like a question mark … The poems explore the function of the particular mark of punctuation and its metaphorical and visual representation out in the world. Punctuation, or the lack of in poetry, is as essential as the words on the page.
