Interglacial

Free Verse Editions

Series Editor: Jon Thompson

As humanity reshapes geological time in the present, our origins are still legible in the glaciated landscapes of the Great Lakes. In lyric language spliced with borrowed text and single-sharp moments, Interglacial connects a changing region to our deep-past and near-future. Of bird, rock, and lake, this travelogue catalogs species and places both extinct and extant.

What People Are Saying

It's an old art, ornithomancy, this reading the omens of birds. The ancient prophet looked to the sky to see what the world would become; the prophet now scries the birds to see what the world is. Tracy Zeman, in Interglacial, may well be our current poet-prophet, trekking the shore of Lake Superior, conjuring the power of the ostensive-naming the names-to work through the elements, seeking out the "atom knowledge" embedded in the world, a knowledge that allows the knower to be enfolded in the known. Old masters walk with her-Niedecker, Issa-and the voices of living poets whisper through every poem, fusing a moment's living intimacy with time's geologic sweep. The result is a book of nearly hypnotic beauty, lulling us awake into the sparrow-quick attention that is our earthly due. -Dan Beachy-Quick

Tracy Zeman's Interglacial invokes a "commonwealth in / sea & syllable," rendering the coast of the Great Lakes as lines in flux, both shaping and shaped by language. No naïve pastoral, these poems border scatterings of styrofoam and Superfund Sites, reminding us that our moment is one of ecological crisis. Each of Zeman's poems builds a layered linguistic ecosystem collaging various resources-literary, taxonomic, ecological-though Zeman's sound is all her own. Precisely carving her lines to mimic a shoreline's divots and gaps, the poet reminds us of the monumental forces that came before (glaciers now absent) and of the smaller impressions we leave behind, commemorated by the beach stones her "daughter" (the future's voice) "wants to keep." -Kelly Hoffer

Throughout this exquisite ramble in the Great Lakes region, Zeman practices a kind of active attention, not so much observing as participating in the most minute details of a given moment, and in ways that engage all the senses. In its embrace of particulars, Interglacial pays homage to Lorine Niedecker while, formally, it also pays tribute to the haibun tradition, as we travel along with the writing eye, often brought to a stop by intense moments of concrete realization. -Cole Swensen

About the Author

Writing at the intersection of ecology and culture, habitat and habitation, Tracy Zeman's work traverses environmental crises, witnesses disappearing species, and mediates the moral and ethical implications of this age of ecological unraveling. Her previous collection of poems, Empire, received the New Measure Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, and others, and her essays and book reviews have appeared in journals such as Annulet, Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Colorado Review. She has earned residencies from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, The Wild, and Write On Door County. In fall 2022, she spent two weeks off the grid as an artist-in-residence in nonfiction on remote Isle Royale, a National Park in Lake Superior. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons.