Name & Earth

Author: Kylan Rice

Publisher: Bench Editions (2026)

 is a collection of poems about desire—how it can bury us, en-crypt us, make us strange to ourselves and to others. But dirt can be a salve and a poultice; mud will keep a wound from festering. If deeply felt desire is a form of burial-alive, maybe the earth—maybe immersion in the world—can cool the fever of our want, our hunger for another life, a different life or name than what we have. Grounded in an ecopoetics of place, this book seeks—through trial and error, through descent and return—an expanded, more-than-human understanding of desire. It performs the hard lyric work of clawing back to the surface, wiping soil from the eyes, knocking dirt from the ear, and looking with wonder around.