This Ground Beneath Our Feet: Poems by Emily Bright
Holy Cow! Press, April 2026
From storytelling Midwestern poet Emily Bright comes this new collection of poems that span nearly twenty years of writing, from her time in graduate school to the present, and captures a broad swath of personal history, nature, and humanity. Geographically, these poems span from the Atlantic crossings of her ancestors to the forests of Bright’s childhood in New England, to the Mississippi River Valley, to the world contained within a neighborhood backyard.
Bright’s work celebrates simple activities, like gardening and saying hello to neighbors, deepening our appreciation in the natural world and among people. The poems capture subjects with lyrical precision, including Emily Dickinson (“Emily Dickinson Bakes Her Famous Coconut Cake”), the Annunciation School shooting in Minneapolis (“Who Supplies the Candles for the Vigils?”), the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (“Snip”), teaching inmates (“At the State Correctional Facility”), a dawn house fire that sends neighbors tapping at the window for help (“Fire”), hope (“A Short List of Reasons to Live”), and many more divided into four sections: Roots, Ground, Branches, Seeds.
The book’s cover is Open Land, an oil painting by Eric Abrahamson who attended Minnesota College of Art and Design.
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