Books
Winner of the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature
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The Chief of Rally Tree
“Inventive, smart, and often hilariously funny, The Chief of Rally Tree delivers a social critique both searing and sly.” —Ann Pancake, Whiting Award winner "The Chief of Rally Tree is THE book for this moment in our lives, in our history. In it we witness lives earned and lives stumbled into. A woman leaves the world of humans—husband, neighbors, friends—to live among and help distressed trees. They breathe through her.... The characters are wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful, and through them we open ourselves to wonder." —Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner "In precise, gorgeous prose, Boyden explores the shifting lines between civilization and the natural world. Her fallible and endearing characters reveal our humanity in all of its strangeness, culpability, and power. A striking novel of humor and deep empathy." —Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home |
Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry
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The Declarable Future
The poems in this sharp, hallucinatory, and often darkly humorous collection inhabit a world uneasily familiar and promising, but from the distance of a few possibilities into the future. Among the poems where doorknobs emit the daily news, stone angels fall from the sky, and the floating world’s harvest is whatever swims too close, the person with the loupe steadfastly verifies only what can be measured, while the lost man is witness to the unquantifiable and the limitless. Throughout the collection, precise, observant language leads us expertly into the gorgeous, precarious wilderness of The Declarable Future. “I can’t remember a recent book so inhabited by a spirit of unease about where we find ourselves now....her poems don't describe so much as embody this disquiet. This is a wise book by a talented poet.” —Bob Hicok, author of The Legend of Light “Here recent scientific breakthroughs collide with intimate family life, ethereality with the quotidian, and, when we least expect it, the theoretical plane drops off suddenly into the abyss of the too, too real. In these poems of pith and sizzle, ‘Love [is] finding fleas in the fur of our sisters.’ Sisters, you may believe it.” —Nance Van Winckel, author of No Starling |
Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry
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The Mouths of Grazing Things
The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, and magnetism that follow. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar sings to an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish among the barber's sweepings, and the players at "the most dangerous playground in the world" prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time. "In a clear, muscular language loaded with precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer Boyden delivers a world. These are poems of a mature poet deeply engaged with her environment, demonstrating again and again the power of language to surprise and delight in moments of true insight." —Sam Hamill “Delightful, that such complexity of mind should be given to us in such lucid packages." —Albert Goldbarth |