All Things Flow by Tegan Gigante
“These poems — grounded pastorals, elegies, domesticated howls, love songs, secular incantations — refuse to go gently, or any which way, into the darkness that wants to fall. They look on the crisis that grows around us and at the mass extinction we already inhabit, and they shake their head and open their arms and hold us, and all that is left, close and dear.” – Mark Tredinnick
“These poems — grounded pastorals, elegies, domesticated howls, love songs, secular incantations — refuse to go gently, or any which way, into the darkness that wants to fall. They look on the crisis that grows around us and at the mass extinction we already inhabit, and they shake their head and open their arms and hold us, and all that is left, close and dear.” – Mark Tredinnick
“These poems — grounded pastorals, elegies, domesticated howls, love songs, secular incantations — refuse to go gently, or any which way, into the darkness that wants to fall. They look on the crisis that grows around us and at the mass extinction we already inhabit, and they shake their head and open their arms and hold us, and all that is left, close and dear.” – Mark Tredinnick
“These poems — grounded pastorals, elegies, domesticated howls, love songs, secular incantations — refuse to go gently, or any which way, into the darkness that wants to fall. They look on the crisis that grows around us and at the mass extinction we already inhabit, and they shake their head and open their arms and hold us, and all that is left, close and dear.” – Mark Tredinnick
From the vast to the particular, Gigante’s poetry articulates both the wonder of things and the thingness of things — meaning and effect emerge as an inevitable consequence of observation and investigation. Doing the dishes is intimate and political, disquieting and comforting. The sky is simultaneously indifferent and a field of feeling. From a study of ants to the atrocities of advanced capitalism, these poems bear witness to humanity’s connection to, and
estrangement from, the natural world, acknowledging the personhood of creatures, and the animality of our own true nature. Everything, including the self, is at once, independent, self-contained, and interconnected.
— Libby Angel