Land Marks

This book is a feast of holy geographies, a compendium of rituals for worship and attention, a catalog of reasons for praise, and of urgent questions of hope, meaning, and survival in a world "of cruelty and beauty in equal measure." Amidst uncertainty, global strife, and our own human insignificance, these piercing, keen-eyed, compassion-rich poems arrive at both mercy and mourning, reminding the reader that we may not know the land's hymns, but we can-and should-as Tracey does so beautifully, "try to sing them anyway."

-Corrie Williamson, author of The River Where You Forgot My Name and Sweet Husk

Land Marks is a meditative travelogue meticulously engaged with the specificities of place, a record of the ways in which territory changes and is changed by those creatures, human and otherwise, who inhabit it. In these poems, Tracey trains a keen and tender gaze on landscapes across the North American continent and beyond, in an effort "to take everything in. / The scope and prospect. The solace." Deeply aware of the environmental tragedies that both haunt and stalk the late Anthropocene, Tracey nonetheless finds opportunities for glimmering praise. Window washers cleaning skyscrapers, ice cream melting in the desert, beetle cuneiform, unmown New England fields-we witness these afresh in Tracey's limpid phrasing. In these pages, "perhaps you too / will find a place / you forgot you loved."

-Carolyn Oliver, author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble

With precision and compassion, Sharon Tracey invites readers on an exploration of the connections between the humblest creatures that co-inhabit our shared space, from the east coast to the west, and the human species, offering at once a celebration of the natural world and an aching requiem to the relationships we did not create and may not be able to preserve.

-Erin O'Neill Armendarez, Editor-in-Chief, Aji Magazine