Description: "A series of six poems about writing poetry about the natural world in a time of both ecological crisis and encroaching right-wing populism"--
Review Quotes:
"Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Univ., Feb.) ask how one might write in troubled times. (Spahr started by reading Brecht.)"--Library Journal
"Throughout Ars Poeticas, Spahr unpacks the steadily worsening threats of climate change and right-wing populism with humility and artistry. We can't help but wonder what poetry could ever add to the efforts to address them, if not just more lines of poetry. With Ars Poeticas, the answer, despite Spahr's reservations, is a tremendous amount."--Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post
"Spahr's Ars Poeticas offer insight into a conversation on and through the paths lyric pushes us to highlight, both light and dark, and how one might best move through it, even across the failures art provides. Can or should art, specifically poetry, save us? Is that even possible? In the end, Spahr's lyric might just be about survival. If we are willing to work for it, of course."--rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog
"Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas sticks an -s onto the title of antiquity's best-known poem-about-poetry, Horace's Ars Poetica (Latin, 'the art of poetry'). There isn't one meditation on the art of poetry here: there are seven, by turns digressive and recursive, self-questioning and self-devouring."--Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
"To be falsely comforted by poetry in our contemporary moment does a disservice to both poet and reader. One cannot write away the desecration, the wreckage. Silence, however, is its own form of desecration, and Spahr will not be silent--nor should the reader. The success of Ars Poeticas will lie in the reader's ability to take it into the world, whether through their own poetry or with their own body."--Jeff Alessandrelli, The Good Man Has No Shape