Love in a Time of Climate Change by Cindy Ellen Hill

Cindy Hill‘s Love in a Time of Climate Change is a prophetic book, naming us humans as our own willing self-executioners–burning the world up with our own desire, unable to be at home in any real sense of the word: “We are long gone from ourselves,/looking backward like bees flown from the hive / to see our own image in every cell, / marveling at the mountain of our wealth…” Whether speaking as the oracular Blue Mother (Mother Earth) or as a longing human, Hill demonstrates her deftness in both free and formal verse, with shining rhyming sonnets. How much beauty here still is, despite the burning, among the flames.

–Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge

Cindy Ellen Hill has put together a remarkable and wide-ranging collection. Love in a Time of Climate Change is rich with natural imagery, with a love of this earth, which is painfully at risk, as so many of the poems in this volume suggest. Earth itself seems ready and willing to reclaim its primacy over humankind. These poems are beautifully wrought, full of arresting lines, always dramatic, always worth reading.

–Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

What enters a Cindy Hill poem exits utterly estranged. In this patient, intelligent, and formally rich debut, Hill unveils apparently simple observations for the complex and often frightening statements that, in actuality, they always already were. Through careful, often almost chant-like repetition and exquisite attention to poetic form, these poems displace our common assumptions about the world and substitute them with a radically unexpected vision of our climatologically ruined planet. Make no mistake: Love in a Time of Climate Change will thoroughly disarm you.

–John James, author of The Milk Hours