Description: Adaptation as trope, science, and story is a throughline in this collection. Its title nods both to accommodations to change as well as correcting/resisting a variety of existential, environmental, and historical toxins. In free verse and fixed forms, and in a variety of styles and idioms, a central speaker acts as a Greek/pop chorus, singing songs about an imperiled natural world as well as the tragi-comic adaptations of human being. The collection concludes with a Mobius strip series, " On Evolutionary Adaptability: A Cthulucene, Sonnet Crown." These final poems ask the reader to participate in a decentered human, activist planetary repair rather than adapt to the sufferings of climate-driven doom.
Review Quotes:
"From quiet domestic scenes to sweeping ecological meditations, VA Smith's Adaptations traverses personal grief, cultural reckoning, and environmental crisis, always returning to the question of how we endure and evolve. The poems in this collection are anchored in the intimate experiences of love and friendship, but they also reach outward to myth, to art, and to the intricacies of a changing world . . . Smith's voice is unflinching, often playful, always honest . . . steadfast in its commitment to bearing complicated witness." --Troy Urquhart, editor, Willows Wept Review
"With an ear for the lyric and the absurd in human action--scraping off cancers, visiting a son in prison, attending a Zoom funeral--the speaker of VA Smith's Adaptations also reaches for a less human-centric way of being. Mulling over 'this late lust for transformation' and 'how autocracy happened here, ' these poems root themselves in a time of rapid collapse--of ecosystems, species, and democracies--and propose, 'Let's slip our skin this New Year, / change our species.' In Smith's Adaptations, I find a companion for change." --K.A. Hays, author of Anthropocene Lullaby
"VA Smith swirls and rocks her readers inside fields of grassy waves, across beaches dotted with moon jellies, and into the eye of a dung beetle navigating by stars. In a world altered by climate, time, or chance, Smith's lyric searches for a foothold: for 'lungs lush with language, / bodies' rhythm sprung, hearts pumping / with metaphor's grace-- / to make new things both disparate, the same.' These poems are remarkable, stunning in form, language, and insight into adaptations." --Dawn Terpstra, head, Iowa Poetry Association, author of Songs from the Summer Kitchen