By Maya Khosla. Sixteen Rivers Press, 2019.

Poet Laureate of Sonoma County (2018-2020) Maya Khosla has written a new collection, All the Fires of Wind and Light, inviting readers to find themselves in the wild – even in the most challenging times. Drawing from personal history, ancestry, and from explorations ranging from the Bay of Bengal to the Sierra Nevada, Cascades Mountains and beyond, these poems take readers into worlds that are all but hidden, among “the best-kept secrets of our forests,” and sometimes all but crushed. In moments, her work shows a sudden flare of understanding about the sheer scale of fragmentation, even disappearance. And yet these poems are “fortified by nutrients and hope” in the powers of rejuvenation.

“The tone and stance of her lyrical language bestow on each particular – whether commonplace or unique, pitiful or rapturous, insect-tiny or sky-wide – an aura of the miraculous; each individual being, each element is equally mighty in itself and essential to the whole,” writes Pattiann Rogers, winner of the John Burroughs Lifetime Achievement Award for Nature Poetry, author of Quickening Fields (Penguin/Random House).