Psalms of the Early Anthropocene

Book excerpt: These poems are rooted in Place, tugged between howling and praising. Kathleen M. Heideman is a writer, artist and environmentalist working in Michigan?s wild Upper Peninsula. She is the author of Explaining Pictures To A Dead Hare, She Used To Have Some Cows, and Time Upon Once, a book arts collaboration with Phebe Hanson and Rebecca Alm. Heideman is a past fellow of the National Science Foundation?s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program, and the recipient of artist residencies with watersheds, forests, private foundations and the National Park Service. According to Heideman, "These poems were born on a bed of jackpine needles in a weathered cabin on the Yellow Dog Plains of Michigan?s Upper Peninsula. While a nickel mine boomed in the near distance, these words were fed blueberries, bathed in starlight, swatted with a birch vihta, sand-scrubbed, and rinsed in icy water from a red handpump. Within hours, they were howling." Poet Jonathan Johnson (author of In The Land We Imagined Ourselves) writes, ?Kathleen Heideman?s poems are fierce in their affections for wilderness, painterly in their observations, and steadfast in their companionship. Now that the great Jim Harrison has left us, I can think of no poet who knows better or writes more truly the back-country character of Michigan?s Upper Peninsula. In Psalms of the Early Anthropocene the fox, the vole, the white pine, the mossy trail, the aspen and the otter all have a ?prodigal daughter? and their new speaker.?