Broader Bookshelf 2026: Nature Poetry

This book is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry, anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. The editor has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. It also brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

"A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. With work from Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, among others, Living Nations, Living Words showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, 'poetry [that] emerges from the soul of a community, the heart and lands of the people. In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than 500 living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.'"-- Provided by publisher.

"For many years, "nature poetry" has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes--both literal and literary--are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape--be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop--offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States. Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew."-- Provided by publisher.

"This poetry collection celebrates the impossible truths of the natural world and the magic that hides in plain sight."-- Publisher's description

"A book of poems that includes two volumes in one: Finalists and Threat landscape. These poems respond to the threats of ecological collapse including the wildfires of 2019 and 2020 and the pandemic of 2020-2021"-- Provided by publisher.

"Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars extends the intensely phenomenological poetics of 'The Star Field' in Empathy, which appeared over thirty years ago. The book is structured as a continuous enfolding of poems, each made up of numbered serial parts, their presiding poetic consciousness moving from the desert arroyo of New Mexico to the white-tailed deer of Maine and between conversations with daughter, husband, friends, pets (corn snake and poodle), and a woman, or star-visitor, beneath a tree who calls 'any spirit in matter ... star-walking.' These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the channeling of daily experience, to gestalt and angel, dolphins and extraterrestrials. Here, family is a type of constellation and 'thought is a form of organized light.' All our senses are activated by Berssenbrugge's light absorbing lines, lines that map a geography of interconnected intelligence-interdimensional intelligence-that exists in all sentient objects and sustains us. This is not new age poetry but poetry for a new age, rigorous of thought and grounded in the physical world where 'days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.'"-- Provided by publisher.

"What We Lost in the Swamp is a lush and vibrant collection of poems that examines the many manifestations of green: nature, inexperience, jealousy, burgeoning love, and exploring sexuality. It is a slow unfurling. It is a love letter to growth, to rediscovery, to finally learning how to speak the truth. These astonishing poems ask the reader: Who do you want to be in this world? How do you want to build a life? This is not a coming out. This is a coming in to one's truest self."--Amazon.com.

""America's favorite poet" (the Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love--all in a handful of lines. Neither Haiku nor limerick, and certainly not a gimmick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual content into small spaces. Taken together the more than 125 new poems of Musical Chairs show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his luminous career"-- Provided by publisher.

"Billy Collins's thirteenth collection, and first in four years, contains more than fifty new poems that showcase the playfulness, wit, and wisdom that have made him one of our most celebrated and widely read poets. This collection covers many themes, including Collins's profound insights on aging and mortality"-- Provided by publisher.

A Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. In Derricotte's own words: "How do you gain access to the / power of parts of yourself you / abhor, and make them sing / with beauty, tenderness, and compassion? / This is the record of fifty years / of victories in the reclamation / of a poet's voice."

If The Cloud Corporation is, as John Ashbery called it, "the poetry of the future, here, today," then Timothy Donnelly's third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future yet further pressed to the end of history. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts--from a contemporary vantage--the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and Alexander the Great.

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth. In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets--from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder--have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale. Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers--a poetic legacy more vital now than ever. -- From publisher's description.

"In Ariel Francisco's Miami, invasive lionfish are sympathetic spirit animals, the beach succumbs to sea-level rise, and "305 till I die" is a cry for help. The speakers in these hilarious and melachonly poems depict a rich and varied emotional landscape that mirrors that of the state they long to leave, dead or alive. They imagine themselves standing on ocean garbage patches, contemplate the crabgrass on traffic medians, and envision the new beauty of a submerged Miami Beach: "Famed art deco replaced by fire coral / and colorful parrot fish, neon lights / restored by pulsating swarms of moon / jellyfish, lit up like a Saturday night." In one moment the strange becomes familiar, only to become strange again in the next stanza. Taking inspiration from Campbell McGrath and Richard Blanco, among others, Ariel Francisco's second book of poems deals with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millenial Latinx in the Sunshine State."-- Provided by publisher.

Grass's final work, a "series of meditations on writing, growing old, and living in the world"--Dust jacket flap.

"Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives-human, plant, and animal-in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America's continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke's cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance"-- Provided by publisher.

A timely and poignant poetry collection by acclaimed author and Poet Laureate of Kentucky Silas House, including the poem read at Governor Andy Beshear's 2023 inauguration. Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters-a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist-and now Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.

"A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson's transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes: his Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winning debut, Leaving Saturn (2002), which captures the spirit of resilience in the Philadelphia neighborhoods of the poet's youth; Hoops (2006), which finds transcendence in the solemn marvels of ordinary lives; Holding Company (2010), which shifts away from narrative to explore the seductive force of art, literature, and music; Roll Deep (2015), which addresses human intimacy, war, and the spirit of aesthetic travel; and his vulnerable, philosophical latest, The Absurd Man (2020). The volume opens with over three dozen new poems that erupt into full-throated song in the face of indignity and invite us into a passionate experience of the world"--Provided by publisher.

The poems in Roll Deep are whimsical, urbane, and introspective, seeking a rhythmic sound that expresses the realities of the twenty-first century. Whether about child soldiers in Dadaab, a refugee camp in East Kenya, or human intimacy, the poems build community across borders of language and style. From Urban Renewal, The Dadaab Suite: I have come to Dadaab like an actor on a press release, unprepared for the drained faces of famine-fleeing refugees, my craft s glamour dimmed by hundreds of infant graves, children whose lolling heads final drop landed on their mothers backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell in this swelter of dust?

"From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose. In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy"-- Provided by publisher.

" ... J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose."-- Publisher's description

"Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy novels, though she began her career as a poet. "I still kind of twitch and growl when I'm reduced to being the science fiction writer. I'm a novelist and increasingly a poet. And sometimes I wish they'd call me that," Le Guin said in a 2015 interview with NPR. In this clarifying and sublime collection--written shortly before her death in 2018--Le Guin immerses herself in the natural world, ruminating on the mysteries of dying, and considering the simple, redemptive lessons of the earth"-- Provided by publisher.

"Melding documentary with introspection, environmental reportage with a search for meaning, Liebenow's work draws on the lore of geology, botany, biology, and history to show how each aspect of the environment is connected to the rest"--P. [4] of cover.

When the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. The words were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these "lost words" included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions - the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual - became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world. In response, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a "spell book" that would conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. You hold that book in your hands - a book that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grassroots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America. -- From back cover

The influence of Ireland and the Driftless Area of Wisconsin are reflected in Monaghan's poetry.

"This career-spanning volume by Thylias Moss, one of America's most revered literary innovators, conveys the dazzling spectrum of her hypnotic poetic output, written over the past thirty-five years and including selections from each previous book as well as previously unpublished new poems."--Amazon.com.

In this collection of poems the author returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, she shares the wonder of dawn, the grace of animals, and the transformative power of attention. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her adored dog, Percy, she is ever patient in her observations and open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments. A chronicler of physical landscape, she opens our eyes to the nature within, to its wild and its quiet. With clarity, humor, and kindness these poems explore the mysteries of our daily experience.

"Midwood is a restless and intimate volume from a poet James Wood has called "one of the most original voices of her generation." In her third book, Jana Prikryl probes the notion of midlife, when past and future blur in the equidistance. Balancing formal innovation with deeply personal reflection, Midwood subtly but impiously explores love and sex and marriage and motherhood in plain, urgent language. Written for the most part early every morning over the course of a year, in all its changing seasons, Midwood includes a series of poems looking at and talking to trees; Prikryl's careful attention to the ordinary world outside the window forms an alternative measure of time that leafs and ramifies. With their rapid shifts of scale and unusual directness, these poems find a new language for confronting our moment"-- Provided by publisher.

"This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," and commonly refers to medicinal plants. Traditional healers were known as yo'åmte, and they gathered åmot in the jungle, and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders"-- Provided by publisher.

The first comprehensive edition of May Swenson's work, gathering all of the poems she published in the collections Another Animal (1954), A Cage of Spines (1958), To Mix with Time (1963), Half Sun Half Sleep (1967), Iconographs (1970), New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978), and In Other Words (1987), as well as an extensive selection of previously uncollected poems.

"A collection of poems by Arthur Sze"-- Provided by publisher.

Here the author offers more than 60 new poems to incite and nurture contemporary activists. This collection features verse that deals with history, politics and nature, and pays tribute to Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, and the Dalai Lama. She imbues her poetry with evocative images, fresh language, anger, forgiveness, and wisdom. By actively chronicling the conditions of human life today, she shows her compassion, spirituality, and necessary political commitments; these poems remind us of our human capacity to come together and take action, even in troubled political times, and illuminate what it means to live in our world today. -- From book jacket.

"For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers--including his own ancestors--who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more "[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor" (Khadijah Queen). "How do you un-orphan a people?" Walker asks. "How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?" While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker's poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: "I am America's promise, my mother's song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream." Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry"-- Amazon.

"Phil Williams is, like his good friend William Bartram, a totally unique talent. This elegant epic poem, like some miraculous archeological dig, keeps unfolding its treasure. It will take you back to the Travels, and with its imaginative power it will take you back to the eighteenth-century American South, a fearful, and magnificently beautiful, place to walk. Begin with the wonderful postscript. Coleman Barks author of Rumi: The Big Red Book (2010, HarperOne)" "William Bartram's Travels, published in 1791, remains a seminal book for understanding the American South, its flora, fauna, and people. Now, poet and novelist Philip Lee Williams, who has known Bartram's work almost since childhood, has written what will surely be acclaimed as one of the finest long poems ever to come out of the South." "The Flower Seeker is an epic poem that follows young William Bartram on his journey in the American South and during his old age in his father's gardens. It is truly a Southern Odyssey, using techniques of fiction and poetry to get deeply inside one of the most remarkable men ever to strap on a pair of boots in America. Written in twenty-four cantos, the book digs deep into the mind and heart of Bartram, who was also an acclaimed visual artist and naturalist." "The Flower Seeker begins with an unusual but regular stanzaic form but quickly changes as Bartram changes during his four-year journey around the South. The Flower Seeker is a dazzling compendium of poetic devices and approaches. In it, Williams uses the Travels as the basis for an expanding and imaginary universe that describes Bartram's interior world as much as the one he rode through. Long, complex, and yet immensely readable, The Flower Seeker packs an intellectual and emotional punch like few other long poems in the American tradition. It is surely destined to become an enduring classic of Southern and even American literature."--BOOK JACKET.