After award-winning books on environment and scores of articles, this is Gus Speth's second book of poetry. Speth has organized this collection around four ways we address the world: Love, Howl, Laugh, and Remember, which "cover a lot of life's territory." He writes in one poem that "the world bends with the weight of massive contradiction," and, as these poems depict, so do our lives.
Gus Speth recently served as dean of Yale's school of environment and forestry and as professor of law at Vermont Law School. At the United Nations, he was the head of the UN's Development Program. Prior to that, he was co-founder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), where he led on many environmental issues over a period of 17 years. During the Carter years, he served as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Speth currently serves as co-chair of the Next System Project. He and his wife Cameron (Cece), and their dogs Capers and Folly, divide their time between central Vermont and coastal South Carolina.