By Elizabeth Jacobson. Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2025.

As the title intimates, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, a variety of distinct voices sing in this new poetry collection, often expressing the complicated, rapidly fluctuating truths of our heating planet, family function and dysfunction, and the surprising reflections that emerge from a continuous practice of paying attention to the self, society and the greater wild world. These poems work to dispel delusion, empowering the reader to fully witness our deeply troubled and interconnected existence, often presenting a world that leaves us with more questions than answers. Poet Chase Twichell notes: Elizabeth Jacobson’s poems are both profound and transparent, which is rare. Also rare is their intimacy with the natural world, rendered in language memorable for its near-microscopic observation and precision. Set in the desert, the tropics, and the human mind, the poems move fluently from family to ecological grief to the life of the spirit and beyond. Curious, eloquent, surprising, and probing, this book takes a hard, compassionate look at what it means to be human right now, moment to moment, on this injured planet. It’s a book that deepens every time I read it.

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her new collection, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral was published in January, 2025. Her previous collection, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch, and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is also the author of Her Knees Pulled In; two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? and A Brown Stone; and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic which she co-edited. Jacobson’s community projects have received eleven consecutive grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. She is a reviews editor for the on-line literary magazine Terrain.org and directs the poetry programs at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts.