Transit
Poems
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 13 Jan 2026
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- $29.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
A beloved nature poet reflects on environmental change, political transformation, and the ineluctable fact of aging.
We are all human and nonhuman on the move. The poems in Transit emerge from just such a walk through the world. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, and creek beds to the contours of his psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mark off our lives. Several of the poems operate as field notes, drawn from Baker’s work assessing bird migrations, streamflow, and geological movements alongside environmental scientists.
Because of his ecological orientation, Baker’s work is also grounded in a deep sense of home, which is captured in the double meaning of the collection’s title. Each piece in the collection acts like the eyepiece of a surveyor’s transit—a finely tuned short-range telescope, intricately balanced and calibrated to survey the surrounding geography.
Through this lens, Baker pays studied attention to the topographies of the world around us and the terrain of the heart. Both an imaginative point of departure and a love letter to familiar places, Transit poses poignant questions about what we seek as we find our way through the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baker's graceful latest (after Whale Fall) announces that "the world is in pieces," but nevertheless eschews despair. In these poems, "the heart lies open to the world," where past and present meet until "years don't matter." There's a yearning, keening quality to Baker's writing, an attempt to get across "the flavor of some happiness, when we were happy," and a sense of dawning understanding. "I would like to leave a good accounting of my life," he writes, "And leave, when I leave, by a quiet path." The well-trodden paths of memory announce themselves throughout the volume, asking readers to slow their own stride and take in the scenery—birds, landscapes, and fauna—populating Baker's work: "You would miss it if you were hurrying." In a seemingly quiet voice that resounds through the well-crafted musicality of his lines, Baker offsets the drift toward melancholy with an urge to celebrate beauty and what endures of it: "I think we live in many times at once," he notes in a poem that channels and communes with Anne Bradstreet. Self-aware and bruised but celebratory, this astonishes.
