LeeAnn Pickrell's 3 favorite reads in 2024

No ecological system is without conflict. Uncomfortable Ecologies is an exploration of relationships and their tenuous nature. Levinson explores the domestic and wild, the macro and the micro, the familiar and the other, the objective and the confessional. These poems seek to uncover vulnerabilities within ecologies as a bridge to a new level of understanding and intimacy.

The speaker parallels the irreparable losses faced in our environment due to habitat destruction and climate change with the challenges of families facing poverty and addiction. Trees shatter in extreme weather, oceans rinse a family of their dreams, wolves protect one another by… show more.

Following the loose series of Turner’s other recent 2023 publications, The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem, this third book in this “collection” serves as a poetic guide to help us navigate the world we live in. The Dead Peasant’s Handbook begins with the difficulty and hardship of living in the world after losing a loved one before allowing oneself to gravitate again towards delight and wonder. With deep dives into history, the poems traverse the wild terrain of our lives, and it remains ever-constant to the theme at the core of all three recent books―that… show more.

Gathering Broken Light confronts pasts we cannot understand, largely following the October 2017 mass shooting. Anchored in the severity and the beauty of the Mojave Desert landscape, fractured narratives, surrealist repetition, and imagistic lyricism work to contemplate grief, including both overwhelming sorrow and deep love. A voice yearns, "I wish I could sing the sky to you."

In a collection that refuses to flatten the horrors of gun violence, both "flashing restless anger" and immense sadness, acknowledging that grief never leaves entirely, these poems also offer small comforts, even hope, as the "century plants continue to bloom // slowly, like… show more.