The Wind Speaks

Winner of the 2020 Hopper Poetry Prize What would you get if a Taoist monk sat down with Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and G.M. Hopkins to write sonnets that banish conventions of form, structure, & meter, while creating new parameters within which to start, stop, surge, yield, twist, turn, open, close. These poems beg to be spoken aloud; each finds a singular cadence, tension, perspective, to bring to the natural world fresh and sometimes unusual voices (a poem in the voice of a praying mantis? …vulture? …whippoorwill?) Bit by bit, they work from the observed and/or fantasized, to get to the internal, the personal, to a celebratory grief.