Reading Novalis in Montana

In Melissa Kwasny's Reading Novalis in Montana, you will find that distilled title opened wide--the marriage of science and poetry in the uncompromising landscape of Big Sky Country. Like the geese populating this collection--evanescent letters forming in the air above us and moving on--Kwasny's poems strike that tension between the concrete and the ethereal. Here is a voice brave enough to admit loving flowers/more than people and giving readers every reason to understand and celebrate that conviction. Read this book and know what it means to live with the world, rather than on it. <br>--Eric Gansworth, author of A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function <br> Surrounded by new books of poems that seem increasingly thin and merely clever, Melissa Kwasny's work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior, and have a compass that deftly mingles the scholarly page with beauticians' hopes and tobacco pouches; a naturalist's tight focus with the wide gaze of a woman of the world; a lyricist's gifts with a philosopher's understandings. This is the real-deal stuff. <br>--Albert Goldbarth, author of The Kitchen Sink <br> Because of Melissa Kwasny's vision as a poet--her precision of observation, her whimsy and compassion--one might compare her writing to that of early naturalist Gilbert White, the founding father of ecology. But what can the design of a naturalist's daybook be in the twenty-first century when half of the species of the world have been or are in a process of being extinguished? Melissa Kwasny creates a dialectic between self-effacement andarticulation, and through Reading Novalis in Montana one experiences what an eighteenth century reader observed about the Journals of Gilbert White, that to read them is to find one's whole world mended. I think it is the way the writer steadies the mind, <br>--Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature <br> Like H.D., whom she paraphrases and in her artistry resembles, Kwasny knows 'that image is not enough.' Equally intuitive and erudite on the survival of mule deer in winter, Artaud's tormented mind, the Cree story of Wa-sak-a-chak, or what to do with the chokecherry pulp after jelly-making, her prismatic attention never simply reconciles to the patina of past reference, nor to the temptation to become too 'enamored of the surface.' Always querying the otherness inherent in existence, her poetry is meticulous in its moral attention, which is without sermon or admonishment. How to attend to the sum of each instance's experience without falling back upon evaluative methods we've learned by rote? Kwasny's methods of inclusivity and measurement are as open to empiricism as they are to invocation--of animal spirit, of myth, of the great poet philosophers, of the land itself, where 'the dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese, first in my lungs.' <br>--Rusty Morrison, author of the true keeps calm biding its story