Canopy: Poems - Hardcover

by Linda Gregerson (Author)

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.

Author Biography

LINDA GREGERSON is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature and directs the Helen Zell Writers' Program. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the author of six books of poetry and two books of criticism, and the coeditor of one collection of scholarly essays. Gregerson's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.