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鈥攖he ways in which the natural and the human construct and deconstruct each other in the contested realms of art, wilderness, history, devotion, and politics鈥擶ilson鈥檚 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鈥斺渢hat far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown鈥濃攁nd give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood鈥攁nd what can sustain us.
鈥淭here is a thrilling and exacting astringency to Emily Wilson鈥檚 new poems, a form of attention that stitches together the 鈥榮pare, sparred and / tender鈥 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 鈥榞ullying through the somewhat seen.鈥 It stands in the bristling between silence and a lavishly threshed-out language, incandescent with the 鈥榞lossy flanges鈥 of ferns, the 鈥榮un the chill / blazons in.鈥 These surpassingly beautiful poems let us feel鈥攅ven savor鈥攖he condition of our own vertiginous precarity.鈥濃擬ary Szybist, author, Incarnadine, and winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry
鈥淧oetry is rarely so alive as it is in Burnt Mountain鈥檚 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 鈥楩ust-purple glowering green / helleborine鈥 directly into the reader鈥檚 body-mind. With enthralling awareness of 鈥榯he die-cut spiky lichen- / crush and ash,鈥 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.鈥濃擪arla Kelsey, author, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy
鈥淲hat a pleasure and privilege it has been for the past quarter-century to witness the dramatic encounters of Emily Wilson鈥檚 mind with nature via her singularly exquisite poems. This 鈥榙ark-empaneled鈥 nature is always adulterated with culture, it is the compromised, damaged nature we know鈥攂ut Wilson has invented new lenses that bring it closer than it鈥檚 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.鈥濃擠onna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia
