Biogeography by Sandra Meek

Sandra Meek’s Biogeography is beautiful and rich. These are poems you get lost in and transported by, language and scene twisting like vines gorgeously intertwining personal and science. As the name tells us, the personal and natural worlds are connected, even the same. These feel like the best travel poems, and some of them are, and some are a travel into the science around us. Buy here.

From “Cloud Cover”

Repeating the experiment makes it true, makes it / science, this string of gray days // its own conclusion. Each one a needle, a hummingbird sipping / something sweet away. Every // childhood December, cedar waxwings, drunk / on fermented crabapples, dove into the bay window, // demonstrating not sky one by one . . .

From “The Mechanics of Failure" a poem on 9/11

. . . Mostly / there is no warning: planes slam // into buildings, or you do your own / crash and burn, lighting life down // to a finger of ash. My ring, removed, / left a groove that took years // to vanish, what seemed scar finally / a fading, the way, after seasons, a grave settles itself // into earth, or a winter day’s flock of starlings / does stop pouring east, though all morning // their crepe banner had seemed / horizon itself, the blackened sun still // enough to burn the watcher’s eyes . .

From “Departing Flight”

. . . a comet’s just / when there’s no distance left / between fire and ice. It’s earth / that claims us. . .