With poems from such brilliant poets as Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Carl Phillips, Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, Ruth Awad, and many more, this anthology is one to savor. These poems are about the planet we call home: its rivers and trees, its bugs, its mountains and dirt, its shapes and colors. They are vastly different from each other in just about every way: form, tone, subject matter, style. Some are funny and wry. Some are mysterious and strange. Some rage; others are softly tender. Even what any one poet means by the natural world varies wildly.
The poems in this anthology are also very specific. It feels like a collection of love letters to place, and often particular places: specific trees, parks, mountains, desserts, roads, plants. Because of this, there’s an intimacy to the collection that is sometimes lacking in anthologies.
More than anything else, though, this is a both/and book, a twinning of love and grief, wonder and despair. Many of these poems are about climate change and climate grief. Many of them are about loving nature, which, of course, also means loving people, loving ourselves. These messy, contradictory feelings sit together inside almost every poem: Here is the dying world, look at how much I love it. I don’t know how much longer I will get to sit beside this beloved tree, so let me tell you about the color of its leaves. I am so sad, I am just a small human doing my small acts of resistance, but look: here is the sky.
I read this slowly over a month or so, sitting with the wholeness of the poems, the way they capture the vastness of nature and humanity. Very few of them, if any, are all one thing—a grief poem or a love poem, an ode to beauty or an elegy. I kept turning the pages in awe, waiting to encounter a poem I did not love. I never did. The poems in this book all hold inside them what it means to love this planet in its particulars, which means they also hold what it means to grieve for this planet in its particulars. This is a book to come back to again and again; I know I will, and I hope you will, too.