From a review by A. A. Tremblay in Arc Poetry Fall 2025:
When faced with uncertainty we’ve always turned outdoors for answers. This anthology is a testament to that enduring human need to touch grass in difficult times. In one poem, Ching-In Chen visits a fir tree “falling over bluff’s edge” for advice on how to achieve balance; in another poem, Brad Vogel takes comfort in watching ants methodically take apart an old fort, hopeful that the “fortress walls / I’ve built to defend what’s / trapped inside” might also be brought down in time. By paying attention to nature’s cycles of death and birth, of decomposition and new growth, we learn how to persist, adapt and survive through life’s many tragedies.
But what if there’s no more grass to touch? Can we still use the environment as a poetic lens if what we’re trying to process is our grief for how human greed has wounded the Earth seemingly beyond repair? This tension, inherent to the anthology’s thesis, leads to some distressing snapshots of flora and fauna in the Anthropocene, such as in Eileen R. Tabios’ “The Sound of Wildfires”:
When deer are scared, they blow air through their noses
rapidly, evoking the human sneeze. Their sneezes
accompanied me as I left the mountain—as I left them
behind as if they could fight fire.
While its imagery grows less picturesque and more apocalyptic as we burn it alive, nature evidently still offers us a powerful therapeutic framework to work through our paralysing guilt and move, hopefully, towards action.
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