Disorderly and contradictory feelings and a love letter instead

With poems of poets as brilliant as Jericho Brown, Aimee Nozhukumatathil, Carl Phillips, Joy Harjo, Dane Smith, Ruth Awad, and many others, this anthology is to be enjoyed. These poems concern the planet that we call here: its rivers and trees, its insects, its mountains and its dirt, its shapes and its colors. They are very different from each other in all directions: shape, tone, subject, style. Some are funny and ironic. Some are mysterious and strange. A certain rage; Others are slowly tender. Even what a single poet means by the natural world varies wildly.

The poems of this anthology are also very specific. It looks like a collection of love letters in the place and often special places: specific trees, parks, mountains, desserts, roads, plants. For this reason, there is an intimacy to the collection which is sometimes lacking in anthologies.

More than anything else, however, it is a book both / and a twinning of love and sorrow, wonder and despair. Many of these poems concern climate change and climate sorrow. Many of them concern loving nature, which, of course, also means to love people, love us ourselves. These disorderly and contradictory feelings are seated together inside almost all poems: Here is the dying world, see how much I love it. I do not know how long I will sit next to this beloved tree, so let me tell you about the color of its leaves. I’m so sad, I’m just a little human who makes my little acts of resistance, but look: here is the sky.

I read this slowly over a month about a month, seated with the completeness of the poems, the way in which they capture the immensity of nature and humanity. Very few of them, if necessary, are all one thing – a poem of sorrow or a poem of love, an ode to beauty or an elegy. I continued to turn the pages in admiration, while waiting to meet a poem that I did not like. I never did it. The poems of this book all remember what this planet means in its details, which means that they also hold what it means to cry for this planet in its details. This is a book to come back again and again; I know I will do it, and I hope you too.