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Book Review :: Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman

Review by Jami Macarty

In Wonder About The, Matthew Cooperman “presents / / a spilling presence” of Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River:

Like an open vein, like a sluiced giant, it rolls on through cottonwood
and willow body, through thistle and rabbit brush, grama and
blue stem, through drought and illusion, it rolls on
beyond us, the river flayed in moonlight (“Thesis”)

Cooperman’s eco- and documentary poetic “pulses in… / a rhythm” of “fluid” enactment, environmental activism, and river ecology, “palimpsesting” on water flow reports, geological surveys, “Colorado homesteading history,” environmental impact studies, and a Colorado oil and gas industry “Well Prediction Map.” Throughout the collection’s three sections, the poems roll like a river lyrically, fragmentarily, and narratively freely mixing reportage, collage, and erasure with homage and elegy. Regardless of their poetic mode or compositional method ultimately the poems aim to “Save the Poudre!”

The poems educate readers about the threats to the waterway’s fragile ecology: “a toil of oil,” the “rhetoric of monuments,” “people on the river,” “lifestyles,” and “progress.” And, the poems raft on inquiry: “what is a river / and what is a season / and what is the reason of oil.” As Cooperman’s poems prompted me to consider “what the river’s for,” I thought about the Diamond-Water Paradox which poses the question: If we need water to survive and we do not need diamonds, why are diamonds expensive and water cheap?

From advocacy and from love, Matthew Cooperman carves a “structure of all / perception” through a channel where the two tributaries of wonder are “alive and shimmering.”


Wonder About The by Matthew Cooperman. Middle Creek Publishing, June 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.

Book Review :: the verdant by Linda Russo

Guest Post by Susan Kay Anderson

Linda Russo’s The Verdant, 2023 Halcyon Poetry Award Winner, goes beyond usual eco-poetics to explore what it means to utter human sounds in wild places. In this case, the green world, the world away from plastics and electricity, becomes the focus, becomes the world.

The section called ‘Emergence’ is a long poem/poem series that makes up the book. Under the title/heading, “wild plum, western blue flax, wooly sunflower, come in,” Russo gives us what is essential about communing with wild places:

[. . . ] with rubbly tongue caressing grasses
dropping live seeds caught in songs

We are whisked away to a landscape which does not seem like this planet at all because it is so much the planet that we forget where we are. Russo speaks from the land and all its inhabitants as a being moving through the landscape in a unique way.

Inventive open form poems with lots of white space, careful construction of headings/titles at the top of each page, and a meditative feature at the end do not let us off the hook; we must participate in this world.

the verdant is what happens after spending time out-of-doors. The doorway of the mind is propped open, left open to possibility.


the verdant by Linda Russo. Middle Creek Publishing & Audio, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem “Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).