Author Description

Chaos and calamity abound in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm, and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way—all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of toads, ice on the beach ("dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic"). Bracken may run wild across the planet "waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match" but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they have inherited. This is a collection of raw, distressed, and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat.