Now available in paperback, 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze's visionary collection invites readers into moments of profound attention, where language becomes a way of listening to the living world.Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze's twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and humans. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force.
Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age—endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change—exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling through the Anthropocene, to "make lines/against a void." Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun, ekphrastic poems, epistles, and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak.
Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark collection. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly, we find cause for praise.