Of Spray and Mist

Of Spray and Mist is a book of poetry released in 2020, containing five sequences of poetry written in and about Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington, and a sequence of poetry written about land and colonialism in the Pacific Northwest.Interpretations: Here is a poet's deep engagement with landscape, a refusal to look away from the ugly histories contained therein. With an anticolonial stance that rejects extractivist economies, Bem notes: "You need sand for concrete. You need stolen land. / You need language that has been hollowed out and hallowed." Courting negative capability on his "ritual hike[s]," Bem seeks "an active emptiness" that gives rise to "elaborate, explosive knowing": of place, of deep time. Declaiming "My questions are purely Anthropocene," puzzling over how to be in right human relationship, Bem pursues "movement everywhere and always, until there's nothing left to be but absent."Yet as lover to the forests, Bem experiences a "whiplash of sudden ecstasy, thrown neck toward canopy." In attempting intimacy and even eroticism ("I want my tongue to enter the crevices of the ferns") with Earth, others, and self, he weaves his own interiority with local ecology, reckoning with solitude, partnership, and community, filled with "longing to be ready for what you bring me." And, finding grace in the natural world, he observes "[t]hat which continues to flow continues to forgive." With Bem as our guide, "[w]e seek to know why it all works the way it does. Why it all works out." Luckily, as we know of poetry, "It is enough. It is the surrendering." This book labors-and rests-in hope, curiosity, detachment, and "[s]udden, implosive joy." It is a burst of bright aliveness, "everything in chromatic everything."- Sarah Heady, author of ComfortWhen I read Greg Bem's work, the visionary & the wild are activated in me. There's a hunger for experience balanced with the kind of presence and intellect you'd find in a librarian. A post-colonialist & anti-racist often found on a mountain in Cascadia, or a rainforest when not in a library, Greg Bem is a 21st Century North American poet, living in the margins left for white men who choose to use their privilege to confront their own fear in an age when so much is breaking down. He knows the answers are in rituals and in the "urges of flora and fauna" and his writing's a report of the evolution of his own personal mythology getting us, "closer and closer to the decontextualized core" of his self and our species. Reading his work validates the desire to allow "the world to continue sliding by in the fullest spectrum it can" when almost all contemporary poetry settles for so much less.- Paul E Nelson, Founder of SPLAB, the Seattle Poetics LAB, and author of A Time Before Slaughter: Pig War & Other Songs of CascadiaGreg Bem's prose poems are shocking - an "auburn stability hypnogogic inciting the spurred." They whisper or cry "I am chanting. I am chanting for it to continue." They "wander until it hurts," and we wander along with them, mesmerized by a collection vast and particular, systemic and lyric, that dives "into the artful spin and whisk of that which does dazzle."- Thomas Walton, author of All the Useless Things Are Mine