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Tread Upon—by turns tender and furious, and wholly original—attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.In this book-length poetic sequence, Kondrich explores the social, political, spiritual, and economic drivers of the chronic devaluation of the living world. Imaginative, visionary, and intensely lyric,
Tread Upon challenges our anthropocentric culture and questions notions of individual responsibility amidst corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? Though we begin with a single blade of grass, these poems sprawl near and far, from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich, juxtaposes the intimate and the epic, all while integrating climate research, data, and reporting. In this world, where “Even one blade is a place,” the poems reveal that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.
About the author
Christopher Kondrich is the author of three books of poetry, including
Tread Upon (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press) and
Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His poems have been published in
The New York Review of Books,
The Paris Review,
Ploughshares, and
The Yale Review, and have been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. He is currently Visiting Poet-in-Residence* in the MFA Program at the University of Maryland, and a faculty member for Eastern Oregon University’s MFA in Creative and Environmental Writing. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives in University Park, Maryland with his family.
