Like wind on a lake, newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s 12th book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age – endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change – exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against the Anthropocene, to “make lines/against a void.” Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication through which Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound. In conversation with poet Campbell McGrath, author of Fever of Unknown Origin.
Buy Into the Hush – Sze
Buy Fever of Unknown Origin: Poems – McGrath