To Leave for Our Own Country - Paperback

by John Linstrom (Author)

The poems in TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY offer a new approach to place-based writing and thought in an often uprooted age. Ranging from the shores of Lake Michigan to the small towns of Iowa and Indiana, and finally landing in the heart of New York City, they follow the course of the American small-town diaspora across three decades of a life, from childhood to the cusp of parenthood, asking what it means to belong to a landscape or community that one is constantly destined to leave. Bringing together the personal, political, historical, and spiritual, and filtering them all through the particularities of place and of his neighbors, human and nonhuman, author John Linstrom celebrates the grace of quiet moments and comings-together as he mourns the dislocations and inhuman rendings of a postmodern world. In attending to each place and stage in life with care and listening for new wisdom everywhere, some leavings take on the character of a return, and some returns have the power to release old pains. In our moment of climate crisis and amid cynical challenges to democracy, each rooted in systems of oppression and inequality, such a departure seems both urgent and necessary to turn the world toward healing.

Author Biography

John Linstrom is the author of the poetry collection TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). He is a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at The Climate Museum in New York City, and he is also the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, which reintroduces the ecospheric writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954) to twenty-first-century readers. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Northwest Review, The Christian Century, North American Review, and elsewhere, and his editions of Bailey's works include The Nature-Study Idea (Cornell UP, 2024), The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion (coedited; Cornell UP, 2019), and The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. A child of small-town Michigan, he now lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.