Bees, and After
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Publishing:27th May '25
£30.00
This title is due to be published on 27th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The 119th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize places science at the heart of his powerful poems
For John Liles, science and the natural world form a route into the workings of love, of grief, and of joy in the thrum of life. Judge Rae Armantrout calls his poems “dense, sonically gorgeous studies of various natural things and creatures, including light, bees, minerals, shellfish and crabs, insects, and the workings (and failure) of the heart.” Written under the shadow of our changing climate, Liles’s poems are tender elegies but also praise-songs for the continual unfolding richness of the world. Writes Liles, “oh unending animal, / you go where / the light goes.”
“[Liles] is especially attuned to the small, the things we take for granted or don’t notice at all. . . . [His] speculative precision is where science meets art.”—Rae Armantrout, from the Foreword
“For John Liles, matter’s ecstatic. With precise science and sprung rhythm, his poems render ecological intimacies legible and audible. Biotic or abiotic, everything here sings, from cell down to particle.”—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
“Reading this is like looking into a microscope: everything small is consequential, and almost unrecognizable. A book full of scientific terms shouldn’t be able to grab you by the emotions, but it does.”—Matthew Rohrer, author of Army of Giants
“This is a dual work, both prism and portal, where the specific Real and the honed, carefully tuned language—sonic, micro- and macroscopic—conjoin, crystallizing into delicate forms on Liles’s rarefied page.”—Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night
ISBN: 9780300279412
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
96 pages