In BIRTHROOT, Lisa Marie Oliver transports us to night gardens, a toddler’s subsong… never of mourning. Here we find poems both lush and dynamic–ferns unfolding, the mysteries of new life, death and renewal, and the revelatory, bittersweet labor of mothering. How our cells must be damaged before they nourish.

With fresh language and vivid imagery, these poems buoy us even as they remind us of our accountability, that we are beholden to the Earth and tethered to the lives inhabiting it. Again and again, / this field, salvation.

-Joan Kwon Glass, author of NIGHT SWIM

art by Kendra J Larson