Canopy: Poems - Hardcover

by Linda Gregerson (Author)

A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from "a contemporary master"*--a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment *Los Angeles Review of Books

Linda Gregerson's long-awaited new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, "in a world where every breath I take is luck."

From the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost, the poems ask: How does consciousness relate to the individual body, the individual to the communal, the community to our environment? How do we mourn a loved one, and how do we mourn strangers?

The magnificent poems in Canopy catalogue and reckon with humanity and the natural world, mortality, rage, love, grief, and survival.

In a world of overlapping crises, how do we find language for what we've witnessed?

• The Natural World: From the Global Seed Vault under permafrost to the radical fragility of our shared ecosystem, these poems confront the realities of our planet in crisis.
• On Grief and Mortality: Gregerson asks the most difficult questions--how to mourn a loved one, and how to find the space to mourn strangers lost to tragedy.
• A Witness to History: Bearing witness to a tumultuous decade, the collection holds a lens to events from the Syrian refugee crisis to police brutality and the pandemic.
• The Paradox of Being Human: Fierce and big-hearted poems that catalogue the struggle and astonishment of survival in a world where every breath is luck.

Author Biography

LINDA GREGERSON is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature and directs the Helen Zell Writers' Program. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the author of six books of poetry and two books of criticism, and the coeditor of one collection of scholarly essays. Gregerson's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.