The Writes of Spring

A celebration of and meditation on spring by the leading poets of our time, accompanied by striking nature photography. The Writes of Spring is a landmark celebration of the season of renewal, bringing together fifty-five original, previously unpublished poems written especially for this anthology by many of today's most accomplished poets, including Rodrigo Toscano, Luisa A. Igloria, Kelle Groom, J. Mae Barizo, and George Looney, alongside an exceptional gathering of established and emerging voices. From intimate meditations on birdsong, blossoms, weather, memory, and desire to luminous explorations of grief, history, climate, family, and the fragile resilience of hope, these poems reveal spring not simply as a season but as an enduring human impulse: the perennial return of beauty, imagination, and possibility even in uncertain times. Rather than collecting familiar classics, The Writes of Spring offers readers an entirely fresh encounter with the season through poems appearing here for the first time. Throughout the volume, two dozen luminous color photographs by noted landscape photographer Jeffrey Levine accompany the poems in quiet conversation. Sweeping landscapes, intimate botanical studies, rivers, forests, fields, and blossoms deepen the anthology's celebration of the natural world while inviting readers into moments of sustained attention and delight. Elegantly produced and richly illustrated, The Writes of Spring is at once a distinguished literary anthology and a work of visual art—a volume to return to with each year's first thaw, to cherish throughout the seasons, and to remember that poetry remains one of our deepest ways of inhabiting the living world.