What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.
In Books We’ve Loved, we asked our editorial board members and select guest editors to reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year, with the intention of creating a list of book recommendations for our valued readers.

Catch Up on Issues of What Sparks Poetry





Awareness of what we are part of, an element of, an organism within, is essential to knowing oneself and one’s placement. There is duty inherent to place; balance, sustenance, reciprocity, preservation, protection, beingness, belonging to or being a good guest within. Every step taken has impression.



In Cree epistemology, land is a sentient being; we are co-constituted with it. A Cree ecopoetics, in my mind, is a poetics of the land, a way of acknowledging the sovereignty of land and water and animal and plant life...


The metabolism of our bodies is connected to the metabolism of the planet. We transform, reshape, or “write” our environment by polluting it, by changing nutrient flows and biogeochemical cycles. In response, our environment “writes” us...




