Eco-Dementia

Kauffman is accessing a dark, ancient, and eternally relevant spirituality of nature here, and I'd recommend her book to any reader who has an attachment to place—or suffers from a feeling of alienation from a place—and to those interested in the recovery or invention of language that speaks to both the spiritual and the ecological.

~Jessica Mesman Griffith, Author of Love and Salt and Strange Journey and Founder of the Award-Winning Blog, Sick Pilgrim

The notion of dust to dust—or more accurately rivulet to river or muck to mud—finds original and shimmering expression in Janet Kauffman's new collection of poems. She uses the tools of language and image just as she might take up a shovel and pick, or slide and beaker, to expose the mystery of our ruined earth and our place in it. As playful as they are serious, these poems suggest that all of us—animal, vegetable, and mineral—are caught up in the forces of desire and decay, just as we all suffer the damage that one inflicts upon the other. Even as they take to the open air of abstraction, these poems have dirt under their fingernails and wind in their hair.

~Carolyn Kuebler, Editor of the New England Review

Janet Kauffman not only knows the names for the things that grow in her world, she knows the names for the smallest parts of those things. She knows what they do and what nourishes them. She knows what destroys them. And she understands that the words and the language she revels in can be inadequate in the face of the craziness we live with. We look in these poems for the things this poet cherishes, the beauty of them down in the undercurrents, but she warns us, 'I do believe time has taken us far too far for scattershot revelations or shortcuts through eco-dementia.' We are left with no roadmaps, only a brilliant, uncertain but necessary prophecy.

~Keith Taylor, Author of the Bird-While (Wayne State University Press, 2017)