About Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Jacobson's new poems are both profound and transparent, which is rare. Also rare is their intimacy with the natural world, rendered in language memorable for its near-microscopic observation and precision. Set in the desert, the tropics, and the human mind, the poems move fluently from family to ecological grief to the life of the spirit and beyond. Curious, eloquent, surprising, and probing, this book takes a hard, compassionate look at what it means to be human right now, moment to moment, on this injured planet. It's a book that deepens every time I read it. -Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is
Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her new collection, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral is just out (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2025). Her previous collection, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019), won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch, and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. She is also the author of Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012); two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, “Are the Children Make Believe?” and “A Brown Stone”; and “Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic” which she co-edited (Axle Books, 2021). Jacobson’s community projects have received nine consecutive grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. She is a reviews editor for the on-line magazine Terrain.org and directs the poetry programs at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA).
About Matthew:
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2024) and Wonder About The, winner of the Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek, 2023) as well as NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), and other books. His ninth book, Time, & Its Monument, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press. Cooperman is a 2025 Guggeheim Fellow in Poetry and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang. More info at http://matthewcooperman.org
About atmosphere:
“Our job is to be both epic and tiny,” Matthew Cooperman writes in this powerful book-length poem full of turns and twists on the American long poem road. Cooperman meditates on and tracks our imperiled American democracy, and the precarious future it forecasts as he twines the political world with the challenges and beauty of family life. In the face of crises, he affirms the meanings of love and the ways in which the language of poetry can bring us truths that are shattering and brilliant. —Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
