Canopy

A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from “a contemporary master”*—a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment *Los Angeles Review of Books

Linda Gregerson's long-awaited new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, “in a world where every breath I take is luck.”

From the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost, the poems ask: How does consciousness relate to the individual body, the individual to the communal, the community to our environment? How do we mourn a loved one, and how do we mourn strangers?

The magnificent poems in Canopy catalogue and reckon with humanity and the natural world, mortality, rage, love, grief, and survival.

In a world of overlapping crises, how do we find language for what we’ve witnessed?

• The Natural World: From the Global Seed Vault under permafrost to the radical fragility of our shared ecosystem, these poems confront the realities of our planet in crisis.
• On Grief and Mortality: Gregerson asks the most difficult questions—how to mourn a loved one, and how to find the space to mourn strangers lost to tragedy.
• A Witness to History: Bearing witness to a tumultuous decade, the collection holds a lens to events from the Syrian refugee crisis to police brutality and the pandemic.
• The Paradox of Being Human: Fierce and big-hearted poems that catalogue the struggle and astonishment of survival in a world where every breath is luck.