Book Made of Forest

This title is the winner of the Crashaw prize. Comprised of lyrics, mock journal entries, prose portraits and odes, "Book Made of Forest" answers the 'summons and challenge' of being both human and animal, urban and rural, cultured and philistine, formal and ruinous, willful and acted-upon. Jared Stanley strikes at the absurd thingness of things, rings out their histories, traces their loss in the 6th extinction, figures his voluminous overhearing into poems rhetorical and fragmented, mournful and comedic. People skulk, animals talk, trash multiplies. Contemporary California - it's art, scavengers, landscapes, weeds, pollution - effects its lyric smudges. Yet "Book Made of Forest" finds them all inexplicably desirous. For when the weather is found man-made, a function of our emotions, the pathetic fallacy returns, not as a symptom of undue personal imposition onto the landscape, but as the collective by-product of not having any God to blame. Without a deity, "Book Made of Forest" is the naked almer - "I'll wear any greeting from dirt, as if a hide" - finding its vision in the midst of things that simply happen.