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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
About the author
Heather Swan is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), which was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage (Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. She is also the author of the non-fiction book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press), which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and a companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinshenk Award, and the August Derleth Prize for Poetry. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
