Bücher der Reihe Redux Series

"e;Mad fury all around"e;-somehow the right words about life make it easier to get on with it. These poems do exactly that, catching us out in the most adroit, surprising ways: by sheer skill, self-aware intellect, a mordant wit, abundant heart, a gift for metaphor so exact it produces combustible insights of complex truth. These poems brilliantly enact our contradictory nature, its poles, and they compel us to look within. -Eleanor Wilner

In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. In "Wooden Comb," Fisher-Wirth writes, "I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet, how the world is burning." Paradise Is Jagged is too wise a book to promise impossible reconciliation. Instead it offers a benediction of sorts: Walk with me through this difficult and tender place, it says. Willingly, gratefully, we do. -Catherine Pierce, Danger Days, 2021-2025 Mississippi Poet Laureate

In beautifully lyrical language, Heather Swan evokes both the broken human world of self-inflicted damage (pesticides, herbicides, "the noise of industry and ego") and the healing natural world of replenishment and repair (rock, bird, water, animal, plant, air). If, for Swan, the human body is "a desert drilled for petroleum," "a trout stream dying," "a splinter pulled from a tree," it is also "an astral body," "a celestial body," "a body of light." Whether lamenting the death of a beloved father or the loss of an endangered species; meditating speculatively on the post-apocalyptic thoughts of Noah's wife; riffing on the likes of Kermit the Frog, Wile E. Coyote, or Piglet and Winnie the Pooh; or simply delighting in the freshness and vividness of experience, Swan illuminates the depths of our daily lives. For a reader, gifted with such honest, clear-eyed, evocative and restorative poems as these, there is "Nothing left to say but,/ thank you./ Thank you." -Ron Wallace, For a Limited Time Only