By Linda Russo. Middle Creek Publishing, 2024.

Awarded a Halcyon Award for Poetry from Middle Creek Publishing, the verdant tells of springtime emergence in intimate attunement with the more-than-human world. It is a spacious, lyrical serial poem that holds myriad presences and voices in an imaginative terrain beyond human individualism. Over a lunar cycle, from the Flower Moon of May to the Strawberry Moon of June, the verdant, who is “charged to comprehend,” escapes capitalocene logics and temporalities to find vibrancy, companionship, and counsel among other beings. Through deepening immersion, land community reveals an interspecies amplitude particular to the prairie, woods, and waterways of the high desert of the inland northwestern US. What arises is a mystical daybook of entanglement with animal and plant others that documents the urgency of becoming newly human and fostering a biome-centered energetics.

Linda Russo (InhabitoryPoetics.com) is a poet, scholar, essay-writer, willing co-creator/collaborator and a student of ecospheric care. She is the author of five books of poetry and several edited collections, including Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press). She lives on Nimíipuu and Pelúuc homelands in the rainshadow of the Cascade Mountains and teaches at Washington State University.