human/nature poems

Author: Tracie Morris

Publisher: Litmus Press (2023)

Weaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global pandemics, ecological catastrophe, political unrest, and mourning. As Harryette Mullen writes in her introduction to the book, “this poet’s perspectives are local and global. The work unites hemispheres of earth and brain as it incorporates a wondering mind in a wandering body.” With great precision and abundant insight, Morris articulates the seam of our “human/nature”: “Sol has hands in Cairo, in Luxor / today He Rises. I wonder where / the outstretch lands. It matters knot / what circles your head. What your / kin says is power. Aspects of ever / lasting light, life is always made from parting.”