The Winds of Home Have Names by Diana Elser

In a sense, The Winds of Home Have Names is literally about weather—there is so much here precisely, vividly about climate’s recalcitrant complexities. But this is also a book rich with language and metaphor. Diana Elser‘s unsentimental account of natural phenomena becomes a conceit for that larger, incalculable reality in the face of which all sorts of human hopes and plans—for childhood and old age, achievement and domesticity—risk falling short. There are poems here about fathers, mothers, brothers, falling in and out of love, and all of them are movingly evocative. In this admirably lucid and finely crafted debut, Elser brings us close to the “exceptional weather” of wisdom.

–Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales

As a ‘weather junkie’ I celebrate and applaud this book of poems.  In the American tradition of Robert Frost, Elser’s poems are concerned with both outer and inner weather. Part homage, part elegy to a father – who was a ‘meteorologist to the Gods’ – these poems are lush with weather science, weather balloons, jet streams, ocean currents, flood & drought, blizzard & winds, thunderstorm & calm, climate change and also personal change.  Inner and outer weather are beautifully sung in this collection.  From her first line to last, Diana Elser delivers a debut book of ‘exceptional weather’ in The Winds of Home Have Names.

–Laurie Kutchins, Author of Slope of the Child Everlasting, and The Night Path, a Pulitzer Prize Nomination, BOA Editions Ltd.