The Cloud Path

Praise for The Cloud Path “These searching meditations—sacral yet scientific, passionately metaphorical—show how the grandeur of nature inhabits all human questions.”—David Woo, Literary Hub “Expletives and hallelujahs rose from heart to mouth in equal measure as I read these lush, wise poems that grieve both a dead mother and a dying Mother Earth. A meditation on aging in a fragile global moment, Kwasny’s The Cloud Path is essential reading for anyone who cares about our planet and its inhabitants, for those enduring loss, for those who value the creaturely as well as the eternal. And for writers, well, this book is a transcendent how-to, a guide and a treasure to read alongside contemporary literary naturalists such as Terry Tempest Williams, Camille Dungy, and Kerri ní Dochartaigh.”—Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby “‘Quiet is different than silence, the latter more potent, / more mature,’ Melissa Kwasny writes late in this book of expertly managed and captivating poems, the surest of her career. By then we know the subjects of The Cloud Path: the bereavement of a daughter who walks with her mother’s memory; the adjustment of a lesbian couple to a country town where ‘the villagers, with their upper hand, are dangerous’; and an everyday animism in nature where ‘the fact is, consciousness matters; matter knows it.’ The thinking is dynamic, oblique, and agile in these poems of deep stillness, of conviction: ‘Given my disposition, I will live in one place, / not trembling like the aspen, but swaying / like the heavy spruce, troubled by forces larger than me.’ The concerns and grief that stir so many of us move through this poet like she is their instrument. She transmutes their power. ‘It is not silence without my lost ones in it.’”—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies “Melissa Kwasny writes the poetry I want to read as the world ends. Complicating the boundaries between love and grief, abundance and scarcity, these stunning poems help us navigate our shared twenty-first century catastrophes. Despite her skepticism (or because of it), Kwasny’s ‘faith in the intellectual supremacy / of earth’ gives her the courage to linger on life’s difficult truths. She reports back to us in a sparkling syntax and breathtaking clarity that only deepens our gratitude for what the earth provides, then takes away. ‘Redeemed by proximity to these last of religious signs,’ Kwasny writes, ‘if I believed in priests, I would confess to the pines.’”—Rob Schlegel, author of In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps Praise for Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today “Kwasny has a rare lyric intelligence that can illuminate the most complexly layered quest for understanding without attempting to simplify its parts. These poems never shrink from the most intricate and difficult questions that we, as humans, face.”―Rusty Morrison, author of Whethering and After Urgency “Kwasny gives us here the book our age most desperately needs―not only a book that searches through the self for all the ancestors, all the dead, which makes of violence not despair but threshold to radical repair―a book that asks what is the soul. And the soul is no possession. It is instead what we are possessed by―and soul isn't one thing, but all things, everything, from the herd of mule-deer wary at our own presence, to the soil that bears the plants that bear the seeds the goldfinches feed on, and yes, the soul is those goldfinches, too.”―Dan Beachy-Quick, author of The Thinking Root “I can't shake the feeling that this work is haunted by the spirits of the living earth. Revelatory and resplendent, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is an altar to a higher vision, an elegant meditation fastened to both the inconceivable and the conceivable, the immortal and the material world.”―Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red