Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the inaugural
Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize,
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello's stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, "something other and unknown." These poems explore the author's home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observe nature's seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. The vivid and engaging poetry touches upon history, inheritance, dry rivers, mountains, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifer forests succumbing to climate change or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future. In doing so, Bello creates a connection between generations that underscores our most critical tool for survival: imagination.
Ultimately a dedication of resilience,
Refugia creates a terrain of the imagination that is, like ecological terrain, grounded in image and yet many-layered and unresolved. This poetry is a listening that writes us back into an ecological language of place that is crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
Trade ReviewKyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns—with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood—with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene… Bello's ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems." - Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest
"Kyce Bello's haunting
Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share. Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello's vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I'm thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion." - Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV
Table of Contents
- Part One:
- Refugia (1)
- Dear Future Child
- The Ashram at Leigh Mill Road
- Guide to Flowering Plants
- The Trouble with Belief
- Refugia (2)
- The Tree Coroners
- Message in a Bottle from the Sea of Cortez
- Grail Story
- Phrases in the Original Unspoken
- Brief Guide to Epigenetic Memory with Burning Bosque
- Refugia (3)
- Paper Trail
- Equinox
- Grass Widow
- In the Air Before Easer
-
- Part Two:
- Portrait of the Homemaker at Eighteen
- I Wear Long Skirts for My Own Unwary Pleasure,
- Refugia (4)
- Notes to Future Botanists in Search of Conifers
- The Speaker Reconciles with Spring
- For the Record
- Solar Pinholes
- Gazing on the Mid-Morning in an Expression of Solidarity
- Refugia (5)
- Crossing Elwood Pass
- The Washerwoman Maps Her Body Before Death
- The Carp Pond
- Dowsing
- Refugia (6)
- Field Notes
-
- Part Three:
- Rinconada
- Summer Ends With Ringing
- Landscape with River Restored to its Historic Channel After 100 Years
- Refugia (7)
- Fall Reckoning
- When We Gathered to Stock up On Light
- Cusp with Various Visitations
- Our Names Unfurl Across Winter
- Refugia (8)
- Further Phrases in the Original Unspoken
- Omega
- Archipelago of Ancestral Bodies and Unnamed Landmarks of the Present
- Refugia (9)
- Waveform
- Origin of the Apple
- Right of First Refugium
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
