Description
Everwhen is an anxious, verdant poetry collection that is preoccupied with a chthonic era—when the secrets of long ago catch up to now, and when the past, present, and future collapse into what’s long been identified by indigenous cultures and early naturalists as Uncreation or Deep Time. Driven by the voice of the betrayed Roman goddess Ceres, these poems consider what it is like to live out of time, to suffer unnamed illnesses of the female body, to love and grieve at the end of the world, and to even find hope and joy in “the way an apocalypse can mean/ to reveal.”
About the author
Anne Barngrover is the author of two poetry collections: Brazen Creature (University of Akron Press, 2018), Yell Hound Blues (Shipwreckt Books, 2013) and co-author with Avni Vyas of the chapbook Candy in Our Brains (CutBank, 2014). Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Verse Daily, The Slowdown podcast, Arts & Letters, Guernica, Ecotone, and others. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.
Praise for Everwhen
There is so much to admire in Anne Barngrover’s new poetry collection, Everwhen: linguistic spectaculars, tonal and formal variety, and a prismatic sense of time—the way it stretches into our mythic past and tenuous future while still engaging the issues we face now. These stunning, lyrical poems spiral imaginatively around the subject of toxicity in patriarchal and Capitalist structures, in human bodies, and in our planet. Throughout the collection we encounter Ceres, goddess of agriculture, who bears witness to the catastrophe humans have made of Earth. Yet, she is one of many voices in this book. These voices, both human and nonhuman, are weary, sick, and anxious, yet they persist. Together, they form a chorus to remind us that we are still alive, connected, reaching for possibility: “We are all in need of rewilding,” Barngrover seems to tell us. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
—Danielle Cadena Deulen
Anne Barngrover’s breathtaking and necessary third collection Everwhen is an act of love, a brutal and yet nourishing companion for these times. With brilliant and lush lyricism, her poems are both elegy and ode, guiding us through the unrelenting cascades of catastrophe and collapse, while reminding us that we—our bodies and imaginations— are not separate from earth, and that this is both our crisis and grace: “The ocean remembers. The planets remember. My body remembers everything you’ve done.” What a gift to be told with clarity and warmth that we are doomed. And what an astonishing mercy to be shown how precious we are. Barngrover brings us back to our own wilderness. To read Everwhen is to be rewilded, returned to our capacity for gratitude, care, and possibility.”
—Kendra DeColo
From a barred owl flying straight into the poet’s car—“talons ripping // at the swamp curdled air,”—to a poem told from the perspective of air plants—“we mean and do no harm,” Everwhen brilliantly balances the nightmare of ecological collapse with crystalline moments of intimacy, joy, and painful loss. This is a collection written, “when the maps go away”; it is a language-terrain “too hot for ruins,” Ceres stranded in a burning rainforest during a global heat wave. In sharply perceptive moments, Barngrover skillfully fuses formal diversity with direct, heartbreaking utterance: “I just want / our terrifying lives / to mean something / before the sun comes up.”
—Sandra Simonds
Media
Review by Emily Rose Miller at Up the Staircase Quarterly
