Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Her new collection, Burnt Mountain, is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Fiercely attuned to the match and mismatch between mind and mountain—the ways in which the natural and the human construct and deconstruct each other in the contested realms of art, wilderness, history, devotion, and politics—Wilson’s poetics reckon with resistant forces of nature and with the human drive to subdue what eludes us. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being—“that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown”—and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood—and what can sustain us.
“There is a thrilling and exacting astringency to Emily Wilson’s new poems, a form of attention that stitches together the ‘spare, sparred and / tender’ things that become perceptible once the space around them is cleared. Promising no pinnacle at which to arrive, Burnt Mountain offers instead a panoply of journeys ‘gullying through the somewhat seen.’ It stands in the bristling between silence and a lavishly threshed-out language, incandescent with the ‘glossy flanges’ of ferns, the ‘sun the chill / blazons in.’ These surpassingly beautiful poems let us feel—even savor—the condition of our own vertiginous precarity.”—Mary Szybist, author, Incarnadine, and winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry
“Poetry is rarely so alive as it is in Burnt Mountain’s sublime refusal to relegate landscape to object or backdrop. Here, Emily Wilson documents encounters with fern, trail, rock, and woods in untamed rhythms that current ‘Fust-purple glowering green / helleborine’ directly into the reader’s body-mind. With enthralling awareness of ‘the die-cut spiky lichen- / crush and ash,’ this book continues the remarkable ecological vision that Wilson has cultivated across her body of work, redefining what it means for no mountain or weed or flower or human to ever stand alone.”—Karla Kelsey, author, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy
“What a pleasure and privilege it has been for the past quarter-century to witness the dramatic encounters of Emily Wilson’s mind with nature via her singularly exquisite poems. This ‘dark-empaneled’ nature is always adulterated with culture, it is the compromised, damaged nature we know—but Wilson has invented new lenses that bring it closer than it’s ever been before, while simultaneously honoring its essential strangeness. With her terse yet lush lyrics enacting incantatory scenes that glitter with thrilling arrangements of language, Wilson captures emotions, states, and transformations that no other poet can.”—Donna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia
