Book Picks

Describing visual poetry feels like playing a game of telephone with the strange and wondrous figures that reside in Mita Mahato’s brilliant poetry comix collection, Arctic Play: rocks that are cuts of meat, 12-14 gold-whiskered walruses, the many individual colors existing within a single sea. What follows is meant as a kind of postcard sent from deep inside the world she brings into being, an invitation inside a missive: Dear— In this far-away space and time, thinking of you. 

Play here functions both a genre, a noun, and verb, a description of the ways Mahato explores language and text in constellation with the visual media and materials by salvaging, splicing, fragmenting, weaving, layering, shaping, tincturing, erasing, obliterating, and spacing. 

The discarded materials appear as physically tactile, fragile, and ephemeral as the beings encountered here, their individual and communal life spans clipped short, fragmented, by the climate catastrophes that are no longer approaching but arrived. With the dedication and care of an archivist, Mahato gathers, arranges, creates and recreates, composes and decomposes. Her practice is preservation and devotion, and offers an elegy that is always, at its marrow, an ode, a love poem. 

Arctic Play is a landscape that asks us to experience and navigate the place in the poem and the poem as a place. From the bounds of the comix panel, the dimensions of a poem, a page, a book, the bent edges of a postcard, a beloved writes Wish you were here. 

I always try to read Jewish poetry around the High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. These Days of Awe provide a rare opportunity for true reflection—the things you are proud of, the mistakes you made, the moments of joy, and those of sadness. Reading When There Was Light, Carlie Hoffman’s luminous 2023 collection from Four Way Books, at this particular time of year was a deeply moving experience. Her poems are glorious and subtle, slowly weaving the tapestry of her history as the granddaughter of Russian and Polish immigrants. Judaism is central to her family’s narrative, but any immigrant (or descendant of immigrants) can relate to their story. Coming from somewhere else, fleeing persecution, struggling to build a better life, losing loved ones far too soon, facing hatred for the way you look, the language you speak, the way you pray—all are part of the American experience, for we are a nation of immigrants. And, like many first- or second-generation Americans, Hoffman is overflowing with questions about her people’s past, desperate for a connection to their roots: “Will I ever stop / being angry for never hearing my family’s language?” And though she is often met with silence, she finds ways to make that silence beautiful. She writes:

“In every city, / every spit-shined field, / I hear the violent, ancient noise / of my family’s silence. The silence / shimmers. It is forged the way Earth’s magma / is made into glimmering rock. / This rock will furnish / the future’s room.”

&

“It’s like the sea, / how you can only continue, / through creation—hyacinth and earth— / depends on flesh, on the beginning / of grief. You see your image / within each horse’s frothing mane, / your lawless body a tree.”

Shana Tova, a happy and healthy new year to all who celebrate.

Note: This year, Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Wednesday, October 2nd, and ends at nightfall on Friday, October 4th. Yom Kippur begins at sundown on Friday, October 11th, and ends at nightfall on Saturday, October 12th.

September is associated with the end of summer, with a return to school and various deadlines and responsibilities. Perhaps you’d rather forget all those dreary things, or at least escape them for a time. Leonora Carrington’s The Milk of Dreams will transport readers to a land where children grow wings for ears and their heads fly away from their bodies, laughing. Carrington was a surrealist painter and the author of novels, short stories, and plays. The Milk of Dreams is a book of poems and drawings for children. Carrington’s enchanting, sometimes sinister dreamscapes offer an opportunity to look deeply at the world around us with wonder and with laughter.

When I crave a day with a good friend in New York City, but can’t get there, I go out to lunch with Frank O’Hara.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look 
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

“A Step Away from Them,” from the seminal collection Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, starts with this clear-cut scene from a typical New York day. It’s 1956 but it could very well be today that we walk the streets with him. 

With his trademark wit and intellect, O’Hara invites us into his life with a casual grace that can reach any reader. His observations about everything, from the way neon signs look in the sunlight to a master’s work of art, become a lively conversation between poet and reader. I read Frank O’Hara as if I am talking to a friend, highlighted here in these lines from “St. Paul and All That,” 1961. 

I am alive with you
                         full of anxious pleasures and pleasurable anxiety
hardness and softness
                         listening while you talk and talking while you read
 

Frank O’Hara graciously straddled the line of the Beat generation and the New York School. Lunch Poems, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, cements that idea. So, go out to lunch with our friend Frank, soak up his warmth and wit, and spend the rest of your day a little lighter and a little more aware of the world around you. 

Alice Oswald’s Memorial names itself a version, an excavation, of Homer’s Iliad. In her introduction, she advises the reader: “I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation.” In this version of the Trojan War, Oswald beams light on and through the names of 200 men killed in the war. In the following lines some are granted lives: families, lovers, homes, qualities unrelated to the battlefield. Some are granted individual, particular deaths. Most remain only names preceded by the names of others and followed by the names of others.

Extended similes spread like water or clouds between the dead of Memorial. Each evokes scenes from the natural world, pastoral settings, and far-away homes—the familiar world startling and strange within the litany of violence and death. The nature of erasure, and the white space in the text, breaks apart the pair being compared. The reader learns what something is like, but not what that something is. Each “like” could be stitched to the description of the death preceding, but the word also points to what has been erased, to bright light of the chasm created by the white space, and what grows in the liminal spaces erasure creates.

In the introduction, Oswald, a classist and a poet, reminds us that “ancient critics praised [the Iliad’s] ‘enargeia,’ which means something like ‘bright unbearable beauty.’ It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Memorial wears Homer’s epic down to the unbearable, which the reader is asked to bear: the beauty of the world and the horror humans inflict on ourselves and each other. 

Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth
And watered it and that wand became a wave
It became a whip a spine a crown
It became a wind-dictionary
It could speak in tongues
It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers
And then a storm came spinning by
And it became a broken tree uprooted
It became a wood pile in a lonely field

This book, made of letters, is a love letter itself. Not just from Sarah Ruhl to Max Ritvo, but to friendship itself. A true friend is a rare thing – not just someone whose company you enjoy, but someone who irrevocably changes your life for the better, who leaves their mark on your very soul. It is even more precious when two artists find each other in this way, as Sarah and Max did. They met when Sarah was Max’s student at Yale, but as any educator will know, our students frequently end up teaching us far more than we teach them (sometimes clichés are true for a reason), and Max was no exception. Over the next four years, the writing they inspired in one another is a true gift, one that we, the readers, are privileged enough to witness through their correspondence.

For example, from Max:

“Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That’s what your letter meant to me.”

And from Sarah:

“Courage, I say, 
is you, 
Max.

In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest 

a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.

You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting I hope, still warm.”

Grief and loss touch so many aspects of their story, and Sarah does not shy away from that in her retelling. It is an unflinching portrayal of the deep injustice of death approaching when one’s life has barely begun, when there is still so much more to say. Max passed away after his battle with cancer when he was just twenty-five years old. There is no way to spin that as anything but what it was: a heartbreaking loss. But in all her work, Sarah has an immense ability to provide us with hope, even within the darkest of moments, and with truth. This is not a sentimental tear-jerker of an illness narrative. It is honest. It is real. We see Max’s humor, his passion, his talent, and the joy he brought to everyone he met shine through the pages of this book. He did not waste one second of his (to borrow another poet’s turn of phrase) one wild and precious life, creating a truly exceptional body of work to leave the world before he left it far too soon. And now Sarah has given us yet another gift: Max’s memory becomes a living, breathing thing in her new play adaptation of Letters From Max, which the Poetry Foundation has the great privilege of presenting to the public later this month, following its off-Broadway premiere in 2023.

I could go on and on about my love for this beautiful book and my excitement for its new incarnation, but instead, I’ll leave you with a beloved quote from Sarah’s poem, “Lunch with Max on the Upper East Side,” which first appeared in Letters From Max and was later published in her debut poetry collection, 44 Poems for You (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“Max is a poet.
Max is a poem.
We all become poems
in the end.”

A reading of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Letters from Max will be performed at the Poetry Foundation at 2:00 PM CDT on June 29th, 2024. More details and registration information for this event can be found here.

In March my father passed away, and I understood something that I had previously known, but more shallowly: among its other uses, poetry is a container for grief. In Economy of the Unlost, the poet and scholar Anne Carson examines the ways two poets from vastly different eras and cultures invented new poetic forms for grieving. Born in Greece in 556 B.C., Simonides of Keos was a lyric poet known for his elegies and epigrams. Paul Celan was a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor who wrote poems in German, the language of his parents’ murderers. Carson has placed these writers “side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface in which the other may come into focus.” Carson lays a careful trail for the reader, guiding them through the particulars of the circumstances in which each poet was writing. Simonides, the first poet to craft verse for inscription on gravestones, employs a radical concision dictated by economy. Celan, writing in a language whose meaning had been perverted by atrocity, reshapes and excavates words in order to salvage their value. Holding both poets to each other’s light, Carson offers the reader a deeper understanding of one of poetry’s central impulses: to bear that which is unbearable, which all will bear.

Everyone would like to have an introduction by Amanda Gorman. Her inaugural poem, so brilliantly conceived and presented, really upped the enthusiasm for poetry on January 20, 2021. (I received dozens of emails asking if I knew her personal email address. I do not. I wrote her a fan letter on her website like everyone else could do.) So Gorman’s vote for this marvelous collection of work by young writers is a great vote indeed. I also note her comment that she “finds it ridiculous when poets are automatically waved aside as ‘aspiring’ or ‘emerging’ due to their age.” I couldn’t agree more. Many would say that child poets are the greatest poets. Stuart Kestenbaum, poet laureate of Maine, described this collection by “remarkable writers … full of rich language and moving detail” as helping him feel like a “traveler, seeing places for the first time.”

The poems are long and vibrant, well-lit by strong art and graphic elements. In three sections—“When We Began,” “Where We Are Now,” and “Who We Are Becoming”—the many modes of living are cupped and examined closely. Can’t travel due to Covid? Read poems that carry you easily and deeply into other real worlds, including difficult ones—violence, early pregnancy, prejudice—that matter to teens. This anthology is strongly recommended for all teachers of creative writing, especially at the high school level. You will find sustenance to share in every poem. And here’s a vote for the whole Telling Room initiative too. Molly McGrath, publications director, writes that this “leader in youth publishing has published more than 175 award-winning books and more than 3,500 authors and that more than 40,000 Telling Room books are in circulation.” Endorsed by the governor of Maine and the Maine Department of Education, this book went out to every high school (count, 224) in Maine. Here’s to sharing the voices!

Two open hands on the cover of this large-scale, welcoming volume—celebrating the eighth year of the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project—have kept this book front and center on my desk for months. It’s a warmly openhearted, richly illustrated collection of young voices dreaming, remembering, yearning, connecting: from Somalia, Eritrea, the Philippines, Iraq, Mexico—all speaking truth. John Fox, founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine, wrote about this collection: “These pages, infused with grit and innocence, trauma and truth, color and the sheer aliveness of these immigrant and refugee youth, offer me everything real and hopeful.” Poet Tess Gallagher says, “I took nourishment here. I drank down their words as at a deep, never empty well!” This book carries readers to the source of poetry, and a collective need for care and remembrance. Deep images of love for country, Earth, and personal experience link these speakers. A question I used to ask in poetry workshops was, “How does poetry serve you? What is it doing for you?” Here we find the remembrance and acknowledgement itself helping to create identity and pride. Nguyen Ho, age 17, from Vietnam, writes: “I miss my class, my land, my relatives/ and the city that raised me up.” The editors are to be praised for their deep commitment to this project of encouragement. This beautiful book is a must-have for every high school, community, and ESL class, where wondrous human beings from the wider world have come to reside.

The Get Lit organization of Los Angeles has long seemed to be one of the center points for spoken word poetry experience as well as writing. And here is the handbook, people. In this rich tome of poems, prompts, presentation suggestions, rubrics, helpful hints, stories, and questions, a passionate poet or poetry presenter may find all the guidance needed. Former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera wrote a gorgeous foreword in which he says, “every chapter is a well-carved map of readings, reflections, notations, poets, lines, and wild experimentation.” He recalls the time he asked poet Marie Ponsot why she had said, “The poem I am about to read is an experiment.” She replied, “Juan Felipe, if you are not experimenting, you are not writing a poem!” Bring your highlighter to these pages; you will definitely want to mark favorite passages or suggestions. Editors Lane and Thomas have included poems by so many beloved poets—W.B. Yeats, Kaveh Akbar, Franny Choi—as well as so many new ones. For those of you who keep asking what to do when having trouble writing at all, I’d say pick up a book like this. It’s as full and far-reaching as our lives are. Just do what it suggests for a few hours, or minutes, and you’ll be back on track—even privately, without an audience to listen. Be the poet, be the audience. This book helps you be everything.

When my husband asked our five-year-old grandson a few days ago, “What’s the difference between children and adults?” Connor didn’t pause before replying, “Children are funner.” Lois Ehlert was certainly fun—in every cell of her luminous being. When she died on May 25, 2021, the blow felt doubled because her departure happened only two days after the death of the beloved Eric Carle—two of the brightest glowing beacons of American children’s books for decades. Both Ehlert and Carle passionately loved nature and color, collage, and the magical fun possibilities of surprise on the page. She even received the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Artist award for innovation in their happy field.

Ehlert was also a poet; in books such as Rain Fish, she explores the joys one may find in rearranged trash on the ground. With gorgeous images made from leaves, twigs, cardboard, socks, feathers, and bottlecaps, et cetera, readers are reminded to be observant: “But you better look fast, because rain fish don’t last.” Her autobiographical book Scraps is a gorgeous, colorful narrative of how she became an artist to begin with—her parents told her she could keep all her projects in process out on a little folding table as long as she kept working on them. She wrote, “I was lucky; I grew up with parents who made things with their hands.” Lois inherited their bits and pieces—scraps of fabric, sewing supplies, her father’s wood scraps—and learned that ideas, art, and dreamy images popped up everywhere. She reminds readers to stay vigilant and appreciate the pleasures of every day. In wondrous books such as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Nuts to You!, Growing Vegetable Soup, Moon Rope, In My World, and dozens of others, Ehlert documents and illuminates the poetry and wonder available to all. Now, in honor of her and her beautiful life, please do order a few more copies to give to babies or children or even adults the next time you need a gift for someone. You’ll feel like a more fun person. You can’t go wrong.

In a poem called “Can You Hear Me Yet?” Wyatt, age 14, writes, “I just met my mom this year / I was told my family all died / But there my mom was, waiting for me / on the porch at my aunt’s house.” Bam! In this collection, poems spring from revelation, trouble, complexity, difficulty, and the sheer honesty of young voices. The book is a testament of life, spoken by participants in the great Pongo writing project of Seattle, which has, for many years, supported youth who experience trauma. The streets are not easy. The days do not always shine. But the Pongo project is miraculous. Sure, poetry is art, but it has also been essential therapy forever. Kudos to Richard Gold and the hardworking staff and mentors who make this miracle happen.

Through juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, community health centers, and elsewhere, the counselors and teachers of Pongo conduct their profoundly supportive work, encouraging young voices to experiment with language and share their perspectives. In surveys conducted since 2005, 1,580 young writers reported very positive effects from their creative-writing workshops. Ninety-nine percent said they enjoyed their writing experience, and 81 percent said they felt better after writing. On the back of this anthology, I wrote, “The happy contagion which springs from telling one’s own true story, writing one’s own thoughts, following the trail of imagination … passes from person to person as a healing gift.”

The group poems are often as moving and meaningful as those by individuals. Poet Ellen Bass celebrates how the poems in this book “speak of strength and resilience” as well as hardship, and she quotes Sasha, who writes, “The story of my heart is so high and shiny, only eagles hear it. Deep and velvety—moles wear it tunneling home.” Pongo could be a model for every city in the world. National trainings and free web resources are offered via www.pongpoetryproject.org.

Why would a lifelong writer who has been Oregon’s hardworking poet laureate and published so many books of poetry and prose decide to create his own self-published series of pocket-sized poetry treasures that cost only five dollars each? In November of 2016, Stafford realized he wanted to put a book together in time to give away at the Women’s March in January 2017. He contacted nine editors he knew, but none responded, so he decided to make the tiny book on his own. When he held the first volume in his hand—The Flavor of Unity—he appreciated how easy it felt to give such a small book away—almost like a “festive whim.” He ended up sending 1,000 copies to college students around the nation to distribute at the Women’s March. And he kept making magical little books.

One of my favorites of these appealingly slim volumes is Meditations & Poems for Writers. It’s perfect for writers, teachers of writing, and students. In this hugely helpful treasure, Stafford describes the daily writing practice of his father, poet William Stafford; offers his own remedies for writer’s block; muses on “the powers & pleasures of thought”; and offers a piece about “faith in fragments.” These are some of the most eloquent, encouraging mini-essays one could ever read. They’re all you need.

He manages to sneak in nugget-sized poems, one dedicated to the late, very great Brian Doyle, and to tell amazing stories too. But this is Stafford’s way. He has always been the most generous practitioner of the writing craft, one of the best teachers on the planet, and now offers magical volumes that feel as significant and precious as the Little Leather Library with green embossed covers I inherited from my German grandfather. Stafford’s later editions have titles such as Circumference (Poems of Consolation & Blessing), Earth Verse, In Praise of Disarray (Poems of Love & Affection), We Begin a Better Nation, Dr. Fauci’s Smile (Pandemic Poems), Little Book for Common Good, The Right to Be Forgotten, and An Encyclopedia for Growing Older. But Meditations & Poems for Writers is one you could keep beside you on your writing desk for decades and keep flipping open whenever you need a big boost—or a pal.

Do not miss this magnificent gathering of poems, from William Wordsworth and John Clare to Harryette Mullen and Meena Alexander. Each poem is expertly placed in its own chapter of eloquent context, like a perfect gemstone set in a shining golden ring. Possibly there is no living guide to poetry more deft and caring than Edward Hirsch, widely-published poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation, who also edited the now-classic How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. He’s not only an anthologist, but also the most insightful interpreter of why some poems come to mean so much to so many people: how they penetrate the crush of babble around us and change us forever. Probably some of us feel our hearts have been broken plenty of times in the past few years. Of course, reading poems of empathy helps to mend us more than re-break us. This is a book to keep at bedside, to open when feeling low, to share with those who find poetry mysterious or difficult. It’s engaging, healing, and rich in every way.

The illustrations in this poetry anthology are so gorgeous, you’ll want to paper your rooms with them. Though the title implies the book is for girls, I’ll bet anything boys will claim this book too. Editor Diana Whitney—who is also a yoga teacher in Vermont—snags readers with her stunningly honest introduction; she confesses her own hardest, growing-up secret in the second paragraph. As a queer mother of two teenage daughters, Whitney invites vulnerability and mutual care in every word she writes. Sections such as “Attitude” and “Belonging” and “Rage” will appeal to all the girls we are or remember being. The delicious poems range from Margaret Atwood to Sahar Romani, Sarah Kay to Natalie Diaz. They’re the positively contagious sorts of poems that will encourage writing in others, giving confidence along the way. And the book’s history is already delicious: it was a #1 bestseller on Amazon in the Teen/YA poetry category, and it made the Indie Bestseller list in the YA category too. Keep giving books as gifts, everybody! In one breathtaking poem, Bianca Stone describes, after much trauma and difficulty, being “prepared to do something drastic / like live and live and live.” This book helps readers want to do that even better.

Some anthologies are made of pure love; it’s palpable. Peter Kahn, a longtime English teacher and spoken word educator at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois, founded the Spoken Word Club there in 1999. To say this changed countless lives would be an understatement. His coeditors, all marvelous writers, educators, and presenters of poetry, banded together to select 76 terrific poems from club members across the years—Kahn says, “We could have included at least 500.”

That’s what poetry does: it stirs a sense of abundant life in all. In one of the numerous introductions to this book, Sully Sullivan mentions “befriending [his] bewilderment” as one of the gifts of growing up with such poetry experiences. What a great description. This is a book for teens, teachers, workshop leaders, and poetry readers of all ages. Sections include “Coming of Age,” “Monsters at Home,” and “Survival Tactics.” A different editor gracefully introduces each one.

The legendary Ashley Bryan—painter, poet, storyteller extraordinaire, resident of Little Cranberry Island, Maine, who wintered in Sugarland, Texas, with family—left the planet gently February 4, 2022, at the age of 98. Thankfully, his dozens of books survive him and will continue to bring joy to millions of readers. I recommend Words to My Life’s Song because Bryan tells the beautiful story of his own life, as he does in his last book, Infinite Hope, which records his grueling experiences in World War II. But all his books are treasures. This one focuses on finding, discovering, becoming who we are. Bryan loved random found objects, beach glass, and bits and pieces. From some of these objects, he made puppets and stained-glass windows. He felt poetry emanating from scraps, light, and the tiniest revelations, and being in his presence was a rush of fresh air. He urged children to create their “own home libraries”! (His spoken sentences all had exclamation points at the ends.) I once saw him receive standing ovations from college students, elementary school kids, and a whole bookstore of community members, all in the same day. He was tireless, funny, and perpetually welcoming to crowds of children who visited him on his island. To consider a world without him is simply impossible, so perhaps we might conjure his presence twice as much by talking even more about his books, paintings, love for poetry and Black poets wherever we can. The Ashley Bryan Center will continue in his Maine home. Please support it: visit it and spread the word!

Crews, a fine poet and teacher, appears to have a Midas touch when it comes to gathering wonderful poems and growing popular anthologies. Two months ago, more than 90,000 copies of How to Love the World were in print, and more than 50,000 had already sold. Heartening news for the world of poetry: people are loving and sharing this book, which hasn’t yet been out a year. And rightly so. After too many extremely strenuous seasons, many people apparently want and need more positivity. What finer way than to absorb wondrously inviting poems studded by “reflective pauses” inviting further thinking and personal writing. Poets include Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Amanda Gorman, Alberto Rios, and many more. The connections between these poems feel exquisitely right. This book is needed right now. As with Crews’s previous popular anthology, Healing the Divide, also featured as an earlier YPPL book pick, this volume has an extremely pleasing smaller-size, tuckable-flaps, velveteen physicality. In a melodious foreword, Ross Gay writes, “Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. In his superb introduction, “The Necessity of Joy,” Crews discusses “soul time” and its essential presence. How to Love the World is for everyone—adolescents, teens, adults—who welcomes greater fullness of joy and wholeness of days.

It’s another year, so let’s have Another World. Perhaps featuring two books from Vermont back-to-back in this column is unseemly, but celebrating the voices and visions of young people will never be unseemly. This gorgeous volume sings of inspiration and hope; it’s a new year anthem all its own. The Gengarellys have devoted themselves to working with young writers and artists of all ages for many decades. They offer after-school and summer workshops through the Poetry Studio at their home and garden in Marlboro and teach widely in schools and universities. In her poem “Blossoming Words,” Erin LeBlanc, 12, asks, “What if every flower bloomed a word? / What if each stalk was a sentence?” The poem ends, “words meant to fill a garden, / words that were always there, / waiting for a listener.” Teachers will find these poems by young writers very helpful in classrooms, triggering happy writing contagion. Ann describes a recent conversation with her grandson, in which he called her a different kind of social worker, saying, “You get people to express their emotions.” Through wide, clean pages; a large, appealing font; and many imaginative full-color works of visual art, Another World carries readers away to better places. Happy 2022!

In this marvelous, compact, first volume of poems by Emilie Lygren, a California outdoor educator who has developed outdoor science curricula for youth (the BEETLES project at the Lawrence Hall of Science) and worked as a life coach and mentor for teens, a kitchen manager, and a barista, readers find a world shimmering in beauty and possibility. Whether contemplating the daily news or rivers or mothers or circles of students really discovering the outdoors for the first time, Lygren’s poems shimmer with revelation. There is a simplicity of being in every act and day that abides and sustains all people. Soil, a fly, shadows, the ways of planting seeds—Lygren writes about her father’s tools in a poem that has made me cry so many times since first hearing it years ago in a Tassajara wilderness workshop and then seeing it years later on a page. What tools do people really need? How do people keep constructing lives they might live honorably, together? How do people keep being born to new wonder the longer they live? Lygren is a meditative poet with immense social energy: her lines inspire people to become better. They also encourage thinking of poems that may have been missed. Everyone is richer than they think they are. Give this book to people you love as well as yourself.