REWILD is one of the most exciting and original collections I've read in years... With the perfect balance of dark humor and vulnerability, this poet grapples with climate change, capitalism, the horrors of human history... I'm grateful for the wide, generous lens of this book, and this poet, right now. I see--perceive--differently having spent time inside these poems.--Maggie Smith, Dorset Prize Judge's Citation
REWILD is a collection of documentary lyric poetry that explores places that have been ravaged by war and environmental plunder then left alone to regenerate and restore. At this moment where we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the poems hover between ruin and restoration. They open ways we can ask transformative questions and turn ourselves into these questions that begin to tunnel through difficulty and despair into another spreadsheet than human ... chromosomal and intricate.To begin to unbuy ourselves, to rewild our communal lives.
Meredith Stricker begins this urgent, gorgeous collection with the open question, 'I don't know if redemption is possible, something / inside us like flowering, a kind of leakage.' Her journey to answers brings us through bones and burns, bees and buffalo, Rilke and Stein, dark matter and ashes, to unflinchingly explore what we have done to the world through violence, commodification, and greed while also illuminating what might yet be possible, even in places of profound devastation. Stricker's careful attention draws us to look deeply, forcing us to see both our complicity in horrors and the beauty even in irrigation ditches, ultimately illuminating the possibility of renewal, of 'burning with animals and greenness.' This necessary collection is both alarm and balm.--Ruth Dickey
Meredith Stricker is an architect and cartographer of the new spirit, one that knows to be a poet is to be plural... she reboots our minds, opening them to atoms, seeds, oceans, buffalo, starfish, and nebulae... She is a protectress of earth and often communicates in the mysterious way of owls, bees, and whales.--Mark Irwin
Poetry. Environmental Studies.
