Overview

These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.

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9781611865639

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Reviews

“‘Stick with me,’ invites Anne Haven McDonnell. Those who do will be rewarded with poems that light up a path toward a deep ecology of care that, if one opens as fully as possible to the connections, losses, and generous beauty of the world, can rise from the mycelium we walk. In piñon, along Douglas fir, over lichen, beside elk, always with mushrooms, McDonnell’s poems live and breathe and listen to lovers, fish, mothers, and owls, always with a fluidity of self that allows new connections, new songs.” —Elizabeth Bradfield, author of SOFAR: Poems and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry “Anne Haven McDonnell writes wise and striking poems about the most intimate forms of love—for lichen and pine marten, for beetle-killed pines and Lazuli Bunting, for her mother and lost lovers. To understand her place in the world, she tells us she is undomesticated, she is queer, and her spirit draws near in such naming and claiming, draws us closer to the beauty and suffering of this living world where ‘everything is singing.’ This is a poet who can teach us to love the world better by listening to the sound of elk hooves on river cobble.” —Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems “Singing Under Snow is full of radiant, intimate poems with their own unique mycelial logic: metabolizing grief into meaning and reacquainting us with the deep intelligence of the earth. With this collection Anne Haven McDonnell has created an astonishing poetics of kinship, mourning, and belonging in a time of ecological unraveling. These poems are simply exquisite.” —Jenny George, author of After Image and The Dream of Reason

Author Information

Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches as a full professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she is the author of Breath on a Coal—winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, runner-up for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize, and long-listed for The Laurel Prize—and the chapbook Living with Wolves. Her poetry has been widely published in journals such as Orion Magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, and Terrain.org. Her honors include a Narrative Annual Poetry Contest prize, a Ginkgo Ecopoetry prize, the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize, and a special mention for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Wrangell Mountains Center in McCarthy, Alaska. She is currently a poetry editor for the online journal Terrain.org.

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