Mouth Art of the Bald-faced Hornet by Betsy Bolton

Crum Creek, in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia, reflects the state of thousands of America’s small waterways – flowing under culverts and through dwindling woods, its historic and ecological significance forgotten or disregarded, its presence largely hidden from our eyes.  Yet this creek sustained the Indigenous people of the area, and played a crucial role for early European settlers as well, its water powering local mills, driving local industry.  “For years I passed, unseeing,” Betsy Bolton writes, that confession prompting us too to witness the spiraling fiddleheads “peeking / through brown papery wrapping / as if an old-time grocer had left them”; the bald-faced hornet “spit-balling her palace … of layered paper” to devise a “pendulous world”; the “sentinel” sycamores “spinning wood from air.”  Yet, in the midst of wonder, these crucial poems also call on us to recognize “the poison” we’ve brought to creek and forest, to acknowledge our “mottled history,” to refuse to “look away.”  As she tracks the colonized Crum Creek landscape and simultaneously celebrates its intricacy, its beauty, its resilience, Betsy Bolton invites us to commit ourselves to action, to “reviving the ripples and pools of our past.”

–Nathalie Anderson, author of Following Fred Astaire, Crawlers, Quiver, Held and Firmly Bound (a chapbook), and Stain.