Refugia
Poems
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Bello's tender debut, mothers and children tend to a resilient Earth, even as anxiety about climate change overwhelms the landscape. Exploring the setting of the author's home ground in northern New Mexico, Bello notes "Every planting season,/ worries of drought or calamity// fall silent as cisterns brim/ with the late snows of winter," an observation that does nothing to dispel fears for the next season. A series of poems, each named for spaces whose climate persists despite widespread change around them, seek to emphasize the relationship between the scale of human life and geological time, noting how "we are barely a consequence." A particularly powerful thread is Bello's meditation on the shifting nature of belief in an age of impending apocalypse: "I am sometimes religious,/ but I do not know if it is god I believe in, or apples,// or if there is any difference." If the poems sometimes overexplain their observations, losing some of their delicacy in the process, the most careful constructions still shine: "Yes, that is spring hatching between my hands." Bello's depiction of impending catastrophe serves as a vivid reminder of humanity's role in its prevention.
