Creative Writing Book Launch at Woodhaven

Arborophobia—the latest collection by award-winning poet Nancy Holmes—is a poetic spiritual reckoning. Its elegies, litanies, and indictments concern wonder, guilt, and grief about the journey of human life and the state of the natural world. When a child attempts suicide, western North America burns and the creep of mortality closes in, is spiritual and emotional solace possible, or even desirable? Answers abound in measured, texturally intimate, and often surprising ways.

Ghosthawk is a guidebook of imagination from grasslands to star fields to the weather of the poet’s body. Where’s home in the crises of ecological collapse and mortal illness? Where’s joy with constant pain, a future blurred by smoke? Carrying these questions, Matt Rader wrote down the names of the wildflowers he met in the mountains, canyons and woodlands of his home in the Okanagan Valley. These poems are what he learned, the directions as he can best describe them.