Burnt Mountain

Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Burnt Mountain is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being--"that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown"--and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood--and what can sustain us.