Through poems that verge into prose or otherwise defy formal categorization, Wright traces the trees’ locations from the Ozarks up through Cairo, Illinois and into Rhode Island, where she lived until her death. Once a northern tree it can now be found in southern parts of the U.S. But, as Ben Lerner writes in the forward, this is also a book about climate, because how “could it not be”?Īs the world has changed so have our understanding of and appreciation for the beech. Here, she focuses on the beech tree, an arboreal giant that can be found across the United States. Born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, the prolific poet, who died in 2016, eked lyrical beauty out of the natural world. When the planet itself attacks with what feels like battle magic, it follows that our poets would respond as our most militant tricksters.Īnother standout collection this month is Casting Deep Shade by the late C.D.

This is, after all, a book about a phenomenon that lurks almost invisibly before striking hard in the form of extreme weather events and deadly heat spikes. I’m a lover of a bear trap hidden in claptrap.” Earlier he writes that the collection “is written with fake blood and trick knives.” Such chicanery feels thematically appropriate. But “do not assume,” he writes, that these translations are “free of booby traps. The poet did, however, include English translations in the Appendix. I am a tourist of the Miami that Ojeda-Sagué knows and loves so well I am not her native daughter.

The poems are a mix of English and Spanish, which left this non-bilingual speaker feeling a bit unmoored. This life was folded, doubled, bent over, over-dubbed.” This is not a total picture of the language spoken in Miami rather, it’s a picture of how Ojeda-Sagué experienced it himself, a personal “hallucination” of Miami’s “world of sounds.”

In the opening explainer entitled “A Note on Language,” he writes that “ book is written in the language ecosystem I grew up in: school in English, home in Spanish, the rest of the world Spanglish. They collapse time, throwing into question whether, for example, the thousands of people described in “The Thousands” – “reflected or drowning, thousands are moving along a barbed line” – are those who are already missing in Florida due to recent hurricanes or the thousands more that will be lost in the destruction to come.Įlsewhere, it’s clear that the poems represent the Miami that still looms large in the poet’s childhood memories. Media requests for Jeff Masters and Bob HensonĪt times it’s hard to discern whether the poems describe the city as it exists today or will be soon, a fitting quality given the unpredictable nature of climate change.

Casting Deep Shade by C.D. Wright