Poetry. Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize. The sixth poetry collection by the prize-winning poet Jane Satterfield, Luminous Crown journeys through nature's evolution through the millennia that have led our species to wonder, to awe, and urges us to listen, to enter the soul so much larger than our own. Judge Oliver de la Paz says, "In Satterfield's magnificent poems, the world gleams at the edge of ruin and renewal. In poem after poem we are invited to listen for the murmurs beneath bark and bone. We trace the tremors of species and selves as we collectively move through the Anthropocene, ever watchful of the horizon. We are invited to learn."
Camille Dunge adds, "In Luminous Crown, Jane Satterfield finds way after way to keep me 'in that place of astonishment' accessed when the heart remains wholly open to the greater-than-human world. The ferocity and porosity of these poems startle me into alertness and care. What splendid, necessary work."
Diving in, V. Penelope Pelizzon writes: "The poems of Satterfield's Luminous Crown delight[s] with feral and aural intensities. Even as they mourn species 'caught in the crosshairs of going & gone, ' they thrum with life, their rich linguistic soundscapes vitalizing human and animal experience amid upheaval. Here are wild moors and woods and tundra aplenty, where we meet the fox 'traveling through/ twin kingdoms of dusk and dawn' and 'the crow worrying its rag of mouse, / a needful fable of stab & snatch" and polar bears "microdosing on low-angle / sunlight.' Yet while John Clare and Emily Brontë are her clear forebears, Satterfield's intelligence is unmistakably 21st century, ever-aware that the gem-like/glint across a lawn, / prismatic as it skims a pond might be a drone as well as a dragonfly. Whether in a haunting nonce sonnet for Brood X cicadas or in a sort of toxic lullaby voiced by a fracking executive who soothingly promises [w]e are neighbors &/nosebleeds; disruptors & mutagens, Satterfield brilliantly proves it's a mere slip of the eye from bewilder to Be wilder.'"