"Species of Concern is field guide, spiritual guide, and manifesto. In this intricate and variegated collection, love is active-attention, action, and activism. Drawing on scientific knowledge, history, story lore, and Buddhist practice, Williams illuminates the magic of myth in the natural world in which all fairy tales are grounded. The book arcs from elegiac narrative-losing a husband to cancer and parenting young children as a grieving single mother-to explorations of new love. Interwoven are experiences of loss and joy in poems protesting the destructions of climate change and poems rejoicing in ecological abundance. Just as in summer, the poet's woods are thick with vegetation and the winged air flits, buzzes, darts, whizzes, and sometimes stings, these poems are fiercely in love with language and the world."

-Laura-Gray Street, coeditor of The Ecopoetry Anthology

"Framed as a return to the Oz of planet earth, a physical and spiritual field trip to past and present possibilities, this field guide and field guise employs a deeply felt and considered ecopoetics. Species of Concern enumerates and elaborates all we've lost and must mourn and commemorate from the impact of our collective industrial and technological progress. These poems harken to the wisdom of Gaia, offering avenues of awakening to what is upon us, to what we've wrought, while our planet still holds its myriad opportunities for celebration and immersion in what we dear humans like to call the natural world. With not a word out of place, nor a line out of sync, with a lightness of touch that enlivens the grimmest detail, this book evidences strong commitment to craft as well as conscience."

-Cathryn Hankla, author of a dozen collections, including the forthcoming Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New and Selected Poems

"Amelia L. Williams is one of those rare poets who must, as she writes, 'dowse for truths in patterns.' She notices, whether it's the luna moth or the river rock or the unjust pipeline's path or the absurdity of a lover's cancerlike cancer diagnosis. She chronicles. And then she puts it all together into a remorseless collection. Remorseless in detail. In vocabulary. In interrogation. In honesty. But, at the end, remorselessly hopeful in the face of unbearable loss."

-Alanna Mitchell is an international award-winning journalist, author, playwright, and theatre performer who lives in Toronto