Re: ANTHROPOCENE LULLABY (2022)
The timely fourth book from Hays (Dear Apocalypse) continues the poet’s project of documenting the day-to-day experience of climate crisis as a mother, naturalist, consumer, and writer. “Dear Anthropocene,” the book begins, bidding farewell to the age of the sixth extinction, “& goodbye, vertebrates./ Goodbye to us, the seas high, the sun intensified.” Direct address animates the inanimate as plastic vibrates with danger: “what part/ of you, plastic Mountain Dew/ bottle on the hot grass/ rallies in my children/ from the milk of me.” A glimpse of roadkill inspires admission of the poet’s own littering after a stop at Baskin-Robbins, “to eat some sweetness, & toss away my plastic spoon—” highlighting the complexities of complicity. In answer to the question, “what I have done what I who am this type/ of thing,” comes the agnostic answer, “I don’t know,/ but I know my not knowing for sure/ is part of it, necessary, because thinking I knew too much too fast/ powered me here to the plastic dinosaurs.” This vivid, hard-eyed reckoning with climate change ends with hope in the power of cycles; after all, “lullabies repeat,” and “the body arrives,/ grand, multiple, & turning/ this minute. A temporary miracle.”
––Publishers Weekly, February 2022
“K.A. Hays is a gifted lyric poet whose body of work has been built out of her enduring focus on and concern for the natural world.”
––“17 Collections to Read During Women’s Poetry Month,” Orion Magazine
Human-caused climate change, rapid technological shifts, and selfhood intersect in this urgent and timely new collection. I’m moved by the self-consciousness of the poet-speaker as well as by the virtuosic craft and language of these poems––their sonic echoes, sinuous yet taut syntax, and intimate, self-interrogating tone. If the book is at times harrowing to read, it yet offers solace in the poet’s recognition that matter and energy are not created or destroyed––they transform as they must. Emotionally, intellectually, and musically, Anthropocene Lullaby extends the work of a gifted lyric poet.
––Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
In these poems by K. A. Hays, we find the world made somehow more splendid through her handling, more brilliant through the grace of her caring eye.
––Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade
Confronting environmental destruction, greed, and the digital age, Hays grapples with fear and motherhood, as well as with the loss of the natural world.
––Publishers Weekly, January 2022
Re: earlier work
“K. A. Hays is an indispensable poet whose exquisite and fierce music captures the other-than-human world of fallen trees and scuttling crabs, skunk cabbage and damselflies, the mortal questions of all things that are born only to perish. She leads her reader into quietness, even while the world around her is storm-tossed, reminding us that “In widening, // a lily mouths its dirge / in praise of now.””
––Todd Davis, author of In the Kingdom of the Ditch
"K. A. Hays's Windthrow takes us on intimate pilgrimages into imperiled spaces. Its subtle, finely-tuned art gathers up perception in its fissures and folds and offers it back to us as vision. Austere in their unwillingness to chatter, extravagant in their willingness to unflinchingly face each hollowing-out strangeness of mind and world, these poems are radiant wonders."
––Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, National Book Award winner
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