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Species of Concern poems by Amelia L. Williams
Poems in Species of Concern examine braided journeys of personal loss and environmental grief, of grasping and letting go. Each section opens with a poem set in a speculative future; subsequent poems return readers to the teeming planet we inhabit, where grounding practices of mindfulness allow us to manage many species of concern, humans among them, both vulnerable and culpable. Throughout the collection are persona poems in which strong female figures, many of them mythical—Anemone, the Sieve Angel, the spider, the red velvet ant, and others—take a stand. These guides dare to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the world; they defy their reputations and talk back. This collection commemorates and rejoices in Appalachian and Piedmont landscapes and species, with stories of resilience and hopes for the future. POETRY / General ISBN: 978-1-962082-46-4 (print; softcover; perfect bound) 106 pages |
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“Species of Concern is field guide, spiritual guide, and manifesto. In this intricate and variegated collection, love is active—attention, action, and activism. Drawing on scientific knowledge, history, story lore, and Buddhist practice, Amelia L. Williams illuminates the magic of myth in the natural world in which all fairy tales are grounded. The book arcs from elegiac narrative—losing a husband to cancer and parenting young children as a grieving single mother—to explorations of new love. Interwoven are experiences of loss and joy in poems protesting the destructions of climate change and poems rejoicing in ecological abundance. Just as in summer, the poet’s woods are thick with vegetation and the winged air flits, buzzes, darts, whizzes, and sometimes stings, these poems are fiercely in love with language and the world, conjuring, like our own mitochondria, ‘networks of fractal beauty, diasporic joy.’” “Framed as a return to the Oz of planet earth, a physical and spiritual field trip to past and present possibilities, this field guide and field guise employs a deeply felt and considered ecopoetics. Species of Concern enumerates and elaborates all we’ve lost and must mourn and commemorate from the impact of our collective industrial and technological progress. These poems harken to personal wisdom and the wisdom of Gaia, offering avenues of awakening to what is upon us, to what we’ve wrought, while our planet still holds its myriad opportunities for celebration and immersion in what we dear humans like to call the natural world. With not a word out of place, nor a line out of sync, with a lightness of touch that enlivens the grimmest detail, this book evidences strong commitment to craft as well as conscience.” “Amelia L. Williams is one of those rare poets who must, as she writes, ‘dowse for truths in patterns.’ She notices, whether it’s the luna moth or the river rock or the unjust pipeline’s path or the absurdity of a lover’s cancerlike cancer diagnosis. She chronicles. And then she puts it all together into a remorseless collection. Remorseless in detail. In vocabulary. In interrogation. In honesty. But, at the end, remorselessly hopeful in the face of unbearable loss.” |
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Amelia L. Williams, PhD, a medical writer, hiker, and amateur naturalist, lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She coordinated “The Ties That Bind: A #NoPipelines Collaborative Art and Story Project” of over 250 fabric braids made by citizens in affected communities to protest proposed fracked-gas pipelines in Virginia. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the 2022 Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Twice a Pushcart nominee, she served as Assistant Editor with OneEarthSangha and earned a residency at the Hambidge Center. In 2022 she was a semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Proceeds from her 2016 chapbook, Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photograph, benefit local environmental organizations. Her poems and hybrids have appeared in TAB, Streetlight Magazine, The Hollins Critic, ANMLY, Rabbit, Nimrod International Journal, K’in Literary Journal, The Hopper, Poetry South, and elsewhere.
