Three sequences of poems engaging with deserts, consumerism, Alaskan ice, religious icons, and more. The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore. Altogether, the poems are controlled, precise investigations and interrogations of the ideas and images we take for granted.
