By Rebecca A. Durham. Shanti Arts, 2022.
Chosen by Susan Howe for the Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, Loss/Less is a collection that addresses grief and reverence for the natural world. These commanding yet haunting poems present an “ecstatic interpretation of the natural world that brings Emerson to mind. Her lush, vibrant language is a hymn, hypnotic—and a warning about our human impact, our ‘monstrous lust’ that threatens” (Erin Malone).
Poet, botanist, and artist Rebecca A. Durham is the author of the award-winning ecopoetry books Half-life of Empathy and Loss/Less. She earned a B.A. in Biology from Colby College, a M.S. in Botany from Oregon State University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Montana. Originally from New England, Rebecca lives in Montana where she works as botanist. Find more of her work at rebeccadurham.net
Endorsements for Loss/Less
“This is how I enter the forest & this is how it enters me too.’ Rebecca Durham’s Loss/Less is an ecstatic interpretation of the natural world that brings Emerson to mind. Her lush, vibrant language is a hymn, hypnotic—and a warning about our human impact, our ‘monstrous lust’ that threatens.”
—Erin Malone, author of Hover, winner of the Patricia Bibby Award from Tebot Bach Press
“Loss/Less by Rebecca A. Durham amplifies the sonorous field of lichen, chickadees, obsidian rock, and waters that populate these poems, while simultaneously marking extinction’s silences. The language ‘pulses like iambs’ and asks the reader to listen ‘with mycelium ears.’ We have the privilege to ‘squat here in the hum & flutter’ while Durham wields her botanical magic and poetic craft to render the forest through ‘sap that writhes / finds its way / from my throat.’ She commands ‘uncut / all those holy trees’ in these poems that burst with life and are haunted by the anthropocene’s ‘silver violence / forged from forget.’ Durham asks us to engage in a practice of loss: a necessary practice of grief for the planet.”
—Stephanie Heit, poet, dancer, and teacher, author of The Color She Gave Gravity
“One can only imagine the music created by Orpheus that charmed the plants and animals, and not unlike the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists who painted this story over and over to enact a kind of planetary reconciliation in the midst of political and religious strife, Rebecca Durham’s Loss/Less invites us into a parallel moment in history. One reads the title of the collection, Loss/Less, as loess, windblown sediments that sweep sonically across the page in the manner of ‘This Water Is Licked by Lambs,’ a single poem that is a paean to water moving by anaphora, like water itself, repeating and seducing the ear with iambs. The poems of Loss/Less create a music no reader will be able to resist.”
—Sandra Alcosser, author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature
