Bind

Using an apocryphal etymology from Dante as a springboard, the urgent and darkly comic poems in Bind emerge from Sandra Meek's ongoing engagement with language and place. Set in locales as far-flung as Borneo and as close to home as the rural Georgia college where Meek long taught, the collection grapples with the dilemma of accelerating environmental destruction, which connects us all despite political insistence on its divisiveness. These poemsare concerned with wildness and capture, with species on the brink-whether the Indri indri of Madagascar or the edible-nest swiftlets of Borneo. In Bind, the power and pleasure of language is as tangible as the beauty of the natural world, which Meek seeks out in all its surviving incarnations.