The Next Noise Is Our Hearts

By Kathleen Willard

"In Kathleen Willard's The Next Noise Is Our Hearts, a phrase from her poem "Sunset: Sangre de Cristo Mountains" that keeps piercing me is "a periodic table of agitation." These poems will agitate and disturb readers in multiple ways. The first poem, in a child's voice as he chooses his favorite planet, ends, "Earth / Because we live here." The poems go on to announce that beetles are invincible architects of the new world" and a fossil found on a hike as "a stoic token of a once-was world" In "The Meadow Calls," Willard embraces "the alternate universe of fireflies." And yet: "We are their executioners." From "I Turn Animal" come the words "Say farewell, our earth's autopsy begins /while forensics document the obvious." In the last poem, "Call to Action," the poet writes, "I celebrate, instead, / the whole ecosystem . . . each a hinge that stitches our home together." These poems open our hearts-let them make the next noise "
-Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan and Swan, What Shores?

"Katherine Willard's The Next Noise is Our Hearts draws on history, science, and poetic language to raise our awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world. Poetic words draw the reader into the wonder and awe of the natural world while learning scientific facts on the demise of species or damage to the environment. Fascinating scientific facts are offered - honeybees make twenty-five thousand trips for every pint of honey, and then, we are reminded that humans depend on pollinating invertebrates, forty percent of which face extinction. Our forgetfulness is called out that drought is part of our western climate, that aquifers are withering and "once they are gone, they are gone." The poems are eloquent and to the point. The reader is reminded that 'the world floods with eerie beauty, ' that "small miracles" are right outside your back door, that beauty and wonder and ecological damage occur across the West. The subtext is go out into the world, you will be amazed and appalled, and hopefully called to action. She ends with a call to action; the evidence cannot be ignored."

-Linda Joyce, Emeritus Research Ecologist for the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and owner of the Kealakoa tree farm in Hawaii.

"Kathleen Willard's book is a cri de coeur, and a eulogy for the more-than-human world that is dying all around us yet whose death cries often go unnoticed. From poems depicting fireflies trapped in a jar beating their wings against glass, to a hippopotamus confined to live in a circus's boxcar's aquarium, to the stench of bison killed by the millions and left to rot, Willard's poems move readers beside a suffering world, so we keenly sense the affect human life has on the natural world. ...] We stand at a turning point in history. Willard's sharply defined images serve as a kind of wake-up call, helping us to notice how our lack of tenderness toward the Earth has devastating consequences."

-Anna Citrino, author of A Space Between

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kathleen Willard's poems have appeared in Bombay Gin, Matter, Pinyon Poetry Review, Flint Hill Review, and in the anthologies Landscape and Place, The Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park, Proud to Be, Against Agamemnon, Icarus and elsewhere. She received fellowships for two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and to attend the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. She received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to study and write in India. She is also the author of several other collections of poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1957483245
• ISBN13: 9781957483245
• Release Date: September 2024
• Publisher: Middle Creek Publishing & Audio
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 7.0" x 10.0"