ROOTLINES

A diverse collection of nature poetry by a queer, neurodivergent poet from Appalachia.

This book was inspired by the author’s small mountain hometown in North Carolina, and throughout these poems, Day reminisces about its beauty. She opens with “a little night music,” which reads like symphonic instructions to a composer. The speaker in “of earth:” wonders how Mother Nature felt on the day humans were born, while in “three sisters trail,” she “lay[s] traps for juniper.” The speaker discloses her deepest fears and a secret in “gently.” A daughter who defies all expectations (in a bad way) is the subject of “the accidental birth of a mouth,” while “field guide for the appalachian summer” lists all the necessary elements for that sweltering season, from the basic (“a body of water” and “a willow tree”) to the unexpected (an “empty church” and a “carved death stone”). The poem “places i wish I haven’t hidden” is a numbered list that explores all the forms of making oneself invisible, and “earthly pleasures” enumerates the sights, sounds, and scents of a Southern childhood. Day plays with form throughout, keeping the reader engaged, and her descriptions thrum with energy: She recalls how “the grass sizzles, seizes my bare feet” as she and her companions “cradle crawling pulses between our knuckles” while catching insects. Her verbs are lively and evocative as she listens to “the stony bank crackle” and watches the “juncos glitter,” and her metaphors dazzle with acorns that are “messy fleshy hearts” and a hummingbird that’s a “a clock, tightly wound.” The sole flaw of this collection is a failure to follow through on a detailed exploration of the effects of “climate change and a carbon-based economy,” noted in the introduction; instead, the narrative centers itself firmly in nostalgia. However, the author notes that she’s donating profits from the second edition of this collection to the Indigenous Environmental Network.

A stunning ode to a landscape that the author knows intimately.