Weaving intimate portraits of home with what could be the travel journals of a 21st-century troubadour, Tracie Morris’s human/nature poems is a hymn to the human and more-than-human world. These poems bear the record of a state of heightened perception, springing from the displacements of travel and returning, of memory and its triggers, of global pandemics, ecological catastrophe, political unrest, and mourning. As Harryette Mullen writes in her introduction to the book, “this poet’s perspectives are local and global. The work unites hemispheres of earth and brain as it incorporates a wondering mind in a wandering body.” With great precision and abundant insight, Morris articulates the seam of our “human/nature”: “Sol has hands in Cairo, in Luxor / today He Rises. I wonder where / the outstretch lands. It matters knot / what circles your head. What your / kin says is power. Aspects of ever / lasting light, life is always made from parting.”

Tracie Morris is writer/editor of several books and is a poet, professor, performer, voice teacher and theorist. She has presented her work extensively throughout the world. Morris holds an MFA in poetry from CUNY Hunter College, a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, and studied British Acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dr. Morris was designated an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist and served as the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. She was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at The Iowa Writers Workshop for three semesters before joining the faculty as Professor in Fall 2020.