Preferred Internal Landscape

Author: Emma Winsor Wood

Publisher: Ornithopter Press (2025)

In Emma Winsor Wood's taut, luminous poems, understanding remains elusive, always just out of reach. In place of wisdom, she gathers facts—assembling a collection of true things that do not quite form truth. Here, structure is unreliable: a bear nests in a man's bedroom, birds mimic the sound of obsolete technology, a cemetery becomes a park, a prison, a church. In a world dictated by algorithms, scripts, and the volatile California weather, Preferred Internal Landscape asks what remains when systems fail-when the power goes out, when syntax collapses, when visibility gives way to fog. These are poems as controlled burn, smoldering with everything they refuse to say.