Root & Bone by Liz Baxmeyer

 

Liz Baxmeyer arrives, with Root & Bone, as a dazzling new voice in American Letters. The work here is at once ferocious and tender, as Baxmeyer constructs line by line and image by image a new mythological wilderness in which the conversation isn’t about a woman and the natural world, but between a woman and the natural world. Root & Bone traverses the landscape of grief and loss, birth and the body, illness and growth. The imagery and music here sing alive the flora and fauna of each piece so vividly the reader expects the pages to morph back into bark and wood, flower and moss. Giving voice to the trees, Baxmeyer taps into the natural root of us all. Exhilarating.

–Alice Anderson, Author of Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away  

 

This striking hybrid collection sings of a deep connection to the natural world, to family, to the self. Introspective and full of wonder and wisdom, Baxmeyer marvels at the visceral nature of childbirth, the arbitrary passage of time, and ultimately echoes with an organic empowerment via perseverance and ardent courage.

–Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American.

 

These pieces exist in the space between myth and reality, between history and experience, between what is knowable and what is unknown. They are generational myths: organic, lichen-covered, transformative tales both ancient and contemporary, existing in a recognizable world and a world unfolding in equal parts magic and intellect, and employing a sensibility that might fit what Ursula Le Guin called “archetypal forms of our perception of life.”

 

These poems and stories sing with the old sense of fabulae — dramatic and grounding. Root & Bone takes the reader into terrain that shifts in stunning ways.

–Patrick Grizzell, author of Dark Music, Chicken Moths, 13 Poems, and others.