Overland

In her third collection (following the award-winning Indictus), poet/journalist Eilbert offers an exquisite study bringing themes of nature and climate change to the forefront while also focusing on mental health, grief, trauma, and love. Throughout, she brilliantly tackles today's crises, which she often presents hauntingly, aware that not everyone feels the same sense of urgency: "When I tell academics/ we've entered a threshold without/ bugs, they laugh and say I should/ come to the South and say that. It's like the/ senator who brought a snowball to Congress;/ together we walk into private conveniences." Yet even as she writes persuasively of these issues, signaling a greater need for their presence in the worldview, she makes space for the personal and leaves readers transfixed by her use of language: "I hold/ asanas to release my hamstrings, an area, I'm told, where we store/ our grief. Where in our body is not grief? Time tires us out. This/ is why we invented it, so we might form from ends." VERDICT A fine exploration of nature and self in crisis; those familiar with Eilbert's work will not be disappointed, while new readers will be eager to explore her further.--Sarah Michaelis

(Earth), the Oh problems, I've never been resilient anyway. The ropes  eventually biodegrade around my wrists. Phosphor is a pretty  pretty word, even as it modifies runoff. When I tell academics  we've entered a threshold without bugs, they laugh and say I should  come to the South and say that. It's like the senator who brought a snowball to Congress,  together we walk into private conveniences. What we do is to spend it. I am not empty  of metaphor; I am tired of multitudes. The indelible crush of leaves. Grass  upturned in battle for the ball. Gravel, gravel. Animals grow bigger at the end of their epoch. The wind soothes only when we need confirmation. Close your eyes to breeze. I am not the promise of forgetting. I merged regretfully and I too missed the point. No tonnage no respirators. No Edenic twist. Oh chronic, heavenless now. Look-- a scorch mark in California lumber  resembles the tilted shape of Saturn, the pretty pretty rings of disaster, crashed  moon cores why I'm done with landscapes. Below this beauty, nothing lives. Disaster, my hands shake with its white vantage. Oh problems, my plastic movable cunt, disaster a word loved by what comes after, and we without stars, our bodies alive, thickened-- Gunmetal Gray Man's best weapon, how we describe the dying ocean. from "Dear Daniel--" Bear with me as I shake life back into my brother, who woke only in how he never breathed, uncurled leaf without urge or panic to grow. How I fixate on the fiction of his legacy, where he could have been in the moment that folded me over. My Daniel so far himself he becomes me, cellular sister swarmed as color invading vision. It was 1982 when he couldn't survive chronology, brother I pick from skin and follicles, brother I never. Brother, what might our victory look like had you become a surface, how else would the world attempt to drown you? Brother, you are the hole without edges, a plane above remarkable lines, brother in no need of insistence. Brother, I don't know how anybody does this, I am more machine than you are human. A banner without information, a matte texture without pages. I go on only because I can only remember, as a stadium singing "Sweet Caroline" wants only every manufactured part of the game, and I was there, at the stadium, days later, between two brothers breathing yeast within their surfaces, a woman rising like foul new bread under my stirrup leggings, a woman rising too as your absence. We learn to squirm seductively, a sore apology swabbed in linen. Dear brother, how I prayed to switch places with you, your name twirling on the memorial tree in the grief group, the way I prayed, the way I whispered my secret into the bauble painted with your name, the way I whispered my secret that I did not know I should mourn you. Excerpted from Overland by Natalie Eilbert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.