Winner of the 2021 Halcyon Award from Middle Creek Publishing Praise for Breath on a Coal In Breath on a Coal, Anne Haven McDonnell writes of what is transient and enduring, with intense focus, lyrical precision, and emotional expanse, in poems that are grounded in landscape and \'inscape.\' This is a marvelous debut.-Arthur Sze Searingly honest, tenderly lyric, exactingly gorgeous.
The poems in this collection allow the experience of the More-than-Human to mingle with personal poems of love and loss, allowing the natural to remai. -Jenny George, author of The Dream of ReasonAnne Haven McDonnell\'s Breath on a Coal is my favorite kind of environmental writing - a writing that does not privilege the human experience in nature over nature itself.
And life rises in all its pain and beauty from these pages.
The poems in this collection breathe close enough to the coals that meaning flares up in every line.
One moment, your attention is caught by riveting textures and meticulous observations of the living world; the next, you find yourself exhaling with an achingly clear grief.
The startling truth of I forget sometimes/how trees look at me with the generosity/of water.
Later, a sunlit blizzard of seed/blowing off cottonwoods.
A slug with its eyes of boneless horns glistening along a black road like something just born. / I walk through the dark gates of the trees, -Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native SpeciesThe exquisite poems in Anne Haven McDonnell\'s Breath on a Coal are concerned with wholeness and intimacy and are made out of direct encounter with the more-than-human world with extraordinary sensitivity and directness.
I put on my antlers in the sun.
Her deep knowledge of the earth-gathered from countless hours listening to what elk on the mountain might be saying, to what salmon in the riverbed might be whispering-teaches us the ways we are transformed by other living beings.
Anne Haven McDonnell\'s sinuous, lush language captures the transient nature of existence in narratives that combine revelatory beauty with compassionate wisdom. -Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Interpretive Work and Approaching Ice.
What a thrilling debut from a poet who writes from a widely-lived and richly-attended life.
Reading Breath on a Coal, I feel the animal of my body owling up into awareness, I put my queer antlers on and wear them proudly, I know more deeply how we can be of a place even while admitting that we are made of stolen land.
Winner of the 2021 Halcyon Award from Middle Creek Publishing Praise for Breath on a Coal In Breath on a Coal, Anne Haven McDonnell writes of what is transient and enduring, with intense focus, lyrical precision, and emotional expanse, in poems that are grounded in landscape and \'inscape.\' This is a marvelous debut.-Arthur Sze Searingly honest, tenderly lyric, exactingly gorgeous
