The World It Was (Paperback or Softback)

An elegiacal collection looks unflinchingly at the degradations of the planet and the human body with an urgent appeal to live fully and presently

Written in the wake of the COVID pandemic lockdown, mass ecological tragedy, a chronic illness diagnosis, and the death of Twichell's husband, The World It Was turns its gaze upon loss with unflinching lucidity. “Language is a door,” Twichell writes—yet she circles that door warily, questioning whether words can ever grant true communion with what lies beyond them. As she travels between memories of her childhood and reflections on her aging body, Twichell's signature attentiveness and restraint call the reader to build a dwelling in the uneasy space between presence and grief. Part elegy, part meditation, The World It Was listens for the quiet intelligence of nature even as it mourns what has been destroyed. What remains is a grief that refuses consolation, instead insisting upon the necessity of seeing, naming, and being fully alive inside the brief body and the dying world.

Chase Twichell has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things As It Is and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, which won both the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Twichell was the founder of Ausable Press, a publisher of contemporary poetry.