Woodland

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Music. Ecopoetics. California Interest. Started during the early season fires of 2017 in British Columbia, written that burning year, and finished as the Camp Fire obliterated Paradise, California, the poems and music of WOODLAND blaze with anger. Broken and obsessive, lathing logging terminology and archaisms, the poems ricochet around the new reality of endless fires as the Climate Catastrophe unfolds and "lover & spruce/ rise up the mountain / contorted / for cooling / air-."

The book includes a new "score" by keyboardist Aaron Otheim. Burning the 19th-century parlor music of Edward MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, Otheim fractures the recognizable melodies of this arch-romantic work with both studio and post-recording manipulation to create a startling and darkly timbred composition.

WOODLAND presents two West Coast artists grappling with their personal complicity, "It's who we are / loose // (?& with matches," and the larger societal structures profiting off the unraveling. It is both an indictment of and testimony to the coming disaster.

Knox Gardner is a publisher and activist living in Seattle. He would admit to not being prepared for the rigors of Oregon State's forestry school. His poems have appeared in The James White Review. This is his first full- length book.



Aaron Otheim is a Los Angeles-based keyboardist, composer, and teacher with an interest in cross-genre experimentation. A Northwest native, he graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in jazz studies. While living in Seattle, he organized the highly regarded Racer Sessions. He tours with the band Heatwarmer and has recently scored several dance and visual collaborations.