Earthwork

by Kristin Berger

Scheduled Release Date: Aug 16, 2022

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The poetry of Earthwork is centered around, sprung from, and located in the landscape of mothering during the increasingly mapless territory of climate change and the pandemic. These are poems that take careful care of the small wonders of childhood and parenthood against such large and looming realities; poems that never stray away from wide-eyed honesty, taking in grief, joy, memory, and the strangeness of life, equally. Poems that stay put on the earth, show us with their small mappings a few ways of doing the necessary work.

 

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“Kristin Berger’s Earthwork creates a topography inhabited by complex sorrows and joys. In a seamless braiding of the domestic and the natural world, the body and the celestial, Berger’s poems explore grief, divorce, motherhood, and mortality in language that is part lullaby, part anthem. Some poems face the pandemic, our political climate, and the state of our planet head on, reminding us that Loss is accumulating faster than we had planned.  Other poems buttress our worries and fears with the knowledge that We are here to keep each other up. Throughout this extraordinary collection, Berger’s lyrical, meditative voice buoys readers through the wild wrack lines of our existence, making us ask, Dear world, where would I be without you?”

—Brittney Corrigan, author of Daughters and Breaking