Sandstone and Kin by Camille LeFevre

A former arts journalist, magazine editor, and adjunct professor, Camille LeFevre now writes poetry and creative nonfiction from the unceded lands of the Hisatsinom, Yavapai, and Apache in Northern Arizona. Her essay, “Body Topography,” published in The Dodge, was selected for the 2026 Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has also appeared in Poets for Science, wildscape.literary, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Metphrastics, Fugue, Unleash Literary, Electric Lit, Brevity Blog, and other publications. She has written books on dance and architecture. This is her first poetry collection.

A collection bursting at the seams with wild kin – coral and antlered creatures, coyotes and canyons, roadrunners and ravens, sycamores and scorpions, and the “ancestors/ossified in sandstone” – Sandstone and Kin is a love letter to the creatures and places that root the speaker to an oikos (or ecos). “I am not a tourist,” the poet-speaker, Camille LeFevre, says of her relation to the Earth. With precision and a quality of attention both tender and funny, Sandstone and Kin is a vital guide for resituating ourselves in reciprocal relation to the more-than-human world.

–Sarah Giragosian, author of Queer Fish, The Death Spiral, and Mother Octopus

In her debut collection, Sandstone and Kin, Camille LeFevre turns to the red‑rock landscape of Northern Arizona to probe her shifting sense of self and belonging. With a keen eye for detail, she captures “dusk’s bruised/light across hot desert” and “apricot trees blazing/with small suns,” rendering the region’s beauty with both reverence and urgency. Through these vivid encounters with place, LeFevre traces the lineages and histories embedded in the land – reflections that illuminate the speaker’s own desires, yearnings, and inherited stories. The result is a stunning, breathtaking collection.

–Shannon K. Winston, author of The Worry Dolls and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings

In these rich nature poems, Camille LeFevre sings to us in the language of coyotes, sandstone, hoodoos, and the red dirt that “pulls at my blood,” in stanzas that taste of desert dust and evoke slow centuries of creation. There is music here, and bright poetic jewels excavated by a writer intent on revealing the naked bones and beauty of her wild home.

–Joanna Streetly, author of All of Us Hidden

Here are poems of yearning and healing, of blurring body and land, of devotion and love to the red rock desert and her creatures. Camille LeFevre’s poetry collection Sandstone and Kin is a homecoming. With imagery that can only come from intimacy with the land, these poems sing with images that “plunge dream-/deep into soft pelts as whoop/and woof shingle the mountains.” Coyote is a beloved companion through these poems, crossing the yard, “mouth sly” at the boundary. And as the speaker grows into her desert home, her body becomes “stone/sycamore/other-than/with coyote beside me.” I want to follow this poet into this beloved desert landscape and join her as “to slick-rock curves/I mold my body/in respite.”

–Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Living With Wolves, Breath on a Coal, and Singing Under Snow