Series Editor: Jon Thompson

Elizabeth Jacobson's new poems are both profound and transparent, which is rare. Also rare is their intimacy with the natural world, rendered in language memorable for its near-microscopic observation and precision. Set in the desert, the tropics, and the human mind, the poems move fluently from family to ecological grief to the life of the spirit and beyond. Curious, eloquent, surprising, and probing, this book takes a hard, compassionate look at what it means to be human right now, moment to moment, on this injured planet. It's a book that deepens every time I read it. -Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is

In Elizabeth Jacobson's poetry, What is the lure of this world? is not just a question but a way to encounter what is actual in whatever she sees, imagines or remembers. Her replies create the bracing sensation of engagement with a world just now coming into range. There is enthrallment-and also candor, As if this will cure one failure of the self after another. There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral is a profound achievement. -Ron Slate, author of Joy Ride

From the opening poem, where even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full, we are carried by a poet who looks so hard she sees past seeming emptiness, past void, to the energies and emotions that bind us to each other and the natural world. Here, sugar-dusted bee's eat the sweetness off each other's bodies, pine roots spread their ballad into the earth, and every observation of the more-than-human is an opportunity to delight in the rituals and desires of others, which might then reflect us back to ourselves. Poems of childhood share the origin story of a poet who put anything in my mouth / to know it: sucking salt from the legs of starfish, ash from discarded cigarettes, even dirt clinging to a hairpin from the grounds of Birkenau. Here, the poet insists on taking in the full range of the world's hardships and wonders and, like a bee converting nectar to honey, gives it back to us made new in searching, sensual poems. -Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone

This new collection offers up many secrets. That the human heart has no space or weight limits, is one. Strong works of art like this prompt us to pause. Pause via seduction wielded by language composed of ether, quarter notes and whole rests, Floridian beach sand, high desert soil and leaps of the mind. None lost on the Soul. -Tommy Archuleta, author of Susto

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her second collection of poems, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019) and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from dancing girl press and Everything Feels Recent When You're Far Away: Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (Axle Books, 2021), which she co-edited. Elizabeth is a reviews editor for the online literary magazine Terrain.org, and she directs the poetry programs at Santa Fe's Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA).

Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson's poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book. --Tony Hoagland

This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn't--to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture--an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems. --Marianne Boruch

Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can't help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson's work does, so effortlessly in paradox. I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says--the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now. --Anne Marie Macari

Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson's poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.

Beloved. Betrayed. Despised. Exalted.

What could make a man turn to God when every event in his life screams that God has turned his back on him?

Joseph, the eleventh son of the patriarch Jacob, had his father's favor, and that was his downfall. Sold into Egypt by his enraged and jealous brothers, Joseph is left with nothing to cling to except the stories of his father's God, a seemingly remote and unreachable figure.

Faith may prove futile, but Joseph is desperate - for the very hate that enslaved his brothers has begun to overtake him.

Beloved. Betrayed. Despised. Exalted.

What could make a man turn to God when every event in his life screams that God has turned his back on him?

Joseph, the eleventh son of the patriarch Jacob, had his father's favor, and that was his downfall. Sold into Egypt by his enraged and jealous brothers, Joseph is left with nothing to cling to except the stories of his father's God, a seemingly remote and unreachable figure.

Faith may prove futile, but Joseph is desperate - for the very hate that enslaved his brothers has begun to overtake him.

Together, Santa Fe Poet Laureate Elizabeth Jacobson, Axle Contemporary, YouthWorks, Santa Fe Community Screenprinting, and The New Mexico School for the Arts produced and directed this project of youth poetry and art. Sixty high school students have crafted poems, designed excerpts from their poems with images to be screenprinted as shirts and prints, and created photographic portraits. The entire project is collected in this anthology.