Have you met my book of poems? Allow me to introduce Refugia.
Refugia’s poems grew out of this high desert landscape as surely as any juniper berry or cholla fruit.
They track inner tides of belief and doubt, and move in and out of the kitchen, dreamtime, and wild places. They witness the growing up of children alongside the decline of western conifers. They hold love, beauty, and despair in equal parts.
The title (pronounced ref-you-jee-a) refers to places where plant and animal species can survive periods of unfavorable conditions and climatic shifts. It is a concept that fired my imagination and offered a glimpse of ways in which something might survive from the landscape I love and which is changing before my eyes. The strand of “yes, and” that refugia offered was one I took up and began following in my poems.
In some poems, I turn to my ancestors, who, like most ancestors, know something about surviving loss. In others I turn to the future, leaving my testimony to whoever it is that comes after us, or maybe, as one reviewer put it to “the future self in each of us, reader and writer alike, who is afraid to come into being and grow at a time of such apocalyptic devastation.”
The back jacket calls me a “a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change.” I don’t know if I agree, unless by bright and hopeful we mean raw and heartbroken. For me, hope is mostly an act of unwavering love for the land, and for those who came before us and will come after. Not succumbing to despair is the best way I know to honor their lives.
That, and writing poems to feed them with.
And so, introductions made, I invite you to feed yourself and your loved ones with these poems. Refugia is a great holiday gift–worth the price for the cover alone, not to mention the worlds within worlds that await you inside.
Learn more about it and read nice things folks have said here. Order a copy from your favorite bookseller, Indiebound, or directly from me. For a $20 check I’ll send an inscribed, signed, & wrapped copy wherever you like.
Kyce Bello 