Whale Fall Poems

“The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form.”—Diane Seuss, Paris Review A masterful and moving new volume from a “peerless poet of the natural world” (New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier. In the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single gray whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, microplastics, and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range. Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page, or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.

From the darkness of whale fall, with its strange creatures both real and imaginary, through difficult landscapes of mountain and desert, to "singing the song of being alive and fine to see," this book celebrates a journey "to love that too."

Men have been spit up onto shore by whales and great fish since the beginning of time. This has been going on for forever; perhaps, even longer than forever. This may be true. It may also be true that men have spit whales and great fish up onto shore since the beginning of time. This has also been going on or forever; perhaps, even longer than forever. Which of these happened first, I cannot say. Who knows; who can say? Regardless, before being spit up on land both men and fish sat idly by inside the bellies of their captors, ruminating on their fate-wondering what it all meant-what it all means. Men and fish and everything alive wonder about life, and how they fit into it and it into them; as much as they are able to wonder. Some men I have met seem to wonder less than some fish I have met. Who knows; who can say? Our lives are about wondering: wondering about our lives. Each and every living thing yearns toward growth. This longing is nothing but an eternal search, an eternal wondering about everything that is. At some point we lose the beginning into the end; and what came first is dissolved into the ongoing process. Fish then man, or man then fish, no one can say which came first. All we know is that we are held captive, we ruminate, and then we are spit out into a rebirth. Our mythic journeys as men are like this. Sometimes you cannot tell which came first, the idea that you are a man and that you should do a certain thing because of that; or the doing of a certain thing and then later realizing or deciding that you did it because you are a man. Which came first the fish or the man? You cannot be sure and when you think you have become sure, things shift.

A collection of poems about whales, by such authors as Jane Yolen, Theodore Roethke, and John Ciardi.

Natural history, work, queerness, and family collide in Interpretive Work. When they do, a deep stubborn will emerges, a belief in the unexpected beauty of the world "flaws and all. The poems of this collection foreground the role of the viewer" the interpreter "smudging self across what's seen." From neighborhood kids cussing in the cul-de-sac to marbled murrelets calling in Southeast Alaska, the poems of this book reach toward a moment where one finds "this unsettlement, / this beauty applauded at last." Bradfield delivers her bruised truths through a quiet honesty that stands in ardent defense of mainstream normative expectations. A male singer has a woman's high, sweet voice, redefining beauty. A female deer grows antlers. A woman chooses to be child-free without regret. As a whole, these poems furtively suggest that the tourist on the sunset cruise ship misinterprets the cravings of humpback whales in the same way Bradfield's family, neighbors and bureaucratic officials misunderstand love, sexuality and gender.

Winner of the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction * Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A “delving, haunted, and poetic debut” (The New York Times Book Review) about the awe-inspiring lives of whales, revealing what they can teach us about ourselves, our planet, and our relationship with other species. When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. Fathoms: The World in the Whale is “a work of bright and careful genius” (Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails), one that blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? How has whale culture been both understood and changed by human technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendor, and fragility of life on earth? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover how plastic pollution pervades our earth’s undersea environment. With the immediacy of Rachel Carson and the lush prose of Annie Dillard, Giggs gives us a “masterly” (The New Yorker) exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis. With depth and clarity, she outlines the challenges we face as we attempt to understand the perspectives of other living beings, and our own place on an evolving planet. Evocative and inspiring, Fathoms “immediately earns its place in the pantheon of classics of the new golden age of environmental writing” (Literary Hub).

Poetry. Latinx Studies. BLUE WHALE PHENOMENA uses various poetic forms, e.g., documentary, speculative, surrealism, infused with dark humor, suffering, the comical, the taboo, as well as literary devises such as metaphors and similes, in incredibly unique and strange ways, to shed a light on human cruelty, loss and death. Death is an obsession that permeates throughout this collection, but hope also abounds.