NAME & EARTH
By Kylan Rice
Name & Earth is a collection of poems about desire—how it can bury us, en-crypt us, make us strange to ourselves and to others. But dirt can be a salve and a poultice; mud will keep a wound from festering. If deeply felt desire is a form of burial-alive, maybe the earth—maybe immersion in the world—can cool the fever of our want, our hunger for another life, a different life or name than what we have. Grounded in an ecopoetics of place, this book seeks—through trial and error, through descent and return—an expanded, more-than-human understanding of desire. It performs the hard lyric work of clawing back to the surface, wiping soil from the eyes, knocking dirt from the ear, and looking with wonder around.
Kylan Rice is the author of An Image Not a Book (2023) and Incryptions (2021). He edits Thirdhand Books and teaches at Utah State University.
Intellectually lush, channeling chicory and Keats, Kylan Rice’s poetic voice pries open a mirror; we step through it into an inverted world that belongs to this unique mind, this distinctively ardent language. Equally compelled and disturbed by questions of intimacy, marriage, gender, art, time, and nature, this speaker wields a private set of rhythms, seductive because they are not addressing us. This is the brilliant work of a philosopher who hears the beats of lines in dreams, who wakes to write at a desk or stand in a river or look up flower after flower on an app. Alert, anxious, and submerged, Rice’s poems entice us to descend into our own consciousness, where language is inevitably continuous with matter, where the patterns that make us might be undone, where what’s at stake is the possibility of change, which is also—finally—the possibility of love. —Cass Donish, author of Your Dazzling Death
To understand both Time and Eros as simultaneous, actual green fields—fields to be entered, to be tended—is a gift reserved to very few. And these few are more often saints than poets: Saints Teresa and Southwell for example, but John Clare and Denise Levertov also. In Name & Earth, Kylan Rice celebrates this simultaneity even while carefully noting its every blessed and imperiled detail. These poems are reference points for any imaginable human future. They are instantly indispensable. —Donald Revell
Part record of the evolution of a marriage, part nature journal, part reflection on art, philosophy, and language, Kylan Rice’s Name & Earth covers extensive ground but anchors itself in one central question: how do we as people—Names—in our bafflement and brevity negotiate the older, less frangible structures—Earth—that embrace us, while maintaining a moral and aesthetic awareness for the things of the world and for each other? In a series of rich, poised lyrics, Rice explores the responsibility we hold to unravel the truths of our own selves, how this affects the intimate relationships we build with those around us, how those relationships are circumscribed by the lives we find in nature, and how art, architecture, and literature might articulate a course through the turbulence we generate in our passing. Embracing a variety of technical challenges from short lyrics to sonnets, from sonnets to long multi-sectioned poems that unfold in a dizzying array of clauses, qualifications, addenda, speculations, assertions, and retreats, Rice takes the reader on a journey whose inward and outward geographies are equally capacious. It is a searching collection, unsparing in its self-work, generous in its consolations. —Toby Martinez de las Rivas, author of Floodmeadow