The Thicket

Author: Kasey Jueds

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press (2021)

The Thicket opens into intimate encounters with the more-than-human world—rivers, birds, stones—and with a “you” that is not a person, necessarily, but also not not a person: maybe God, maybe an aspect of the self, maybe neither or both. Often speaking of/to the small or overlooked (weeds by a roadside, an abandoned silo), the poems orient themselves toward edges, transitional spaces like the one where fields shift into woods. Where does one body stop? The Thicket takes an interest in becoming, one thing flowing into something else.

“In Kasey Jueds’s gorgeous new book, The Thicket, every flower, thorn, and body of water is both archetype and fact. These rich lyrics act as doors to a transformation like sleep or like season. Jueds’s poems are like living inside a spell, a magic that is both story and circle. With her close attention to nature and stunning litanies, she enchants the natural world around us and reminds us that through all of our painful changes, ‘how long it takes to become human again.’ Read this book and let yourself be spellbound.”

–Traci Brimhall

“The reader is led gently, generously, into The Thicket as if by hand, branches parted to show what only Kasey Jueds knows—the stories of trees, the language of the wind, and the hush of secret places long undisturbed. In these poems, Jueds attends to the natural world, reveals in rich lyricism its cadences and questions. In a chaotic, distracted world, these poems insist we pause, look, and look again.”

–Leila Chatti

“Long after finishing The Thicket, I felt rocked inside its motion, a music made of wind and river current, blood, breath and wingbeat. In poem after poem Jueds leads us across the natural world, turned fabular by lavishly lyric detail, to passages unseen, through which deer spotted one moment vanish the next. The Thicket is a true beauty of a book, fully awake to the many spells of our existence.”

–Kathy Fagan