Continent: Poems [Paperback]

“These poems buckle and drift in ways that reveal their continental scope. The I of these poems offers its critical lament, but it never overlooks beauty.” --Kaie Kellough

The poems in Continent ask to be done with presuming, knowing, and defining. They trace maps laid across lands and peoples by force, voiced by a speaker both engaged in attendingto this ongoing violence and unable to escape complicity with it. Urgent, visceral, emotionally striking, Aaron Boothby’s debut collection asks the question: how can we see, listen, and feel an ongoing catastrophe and look for what is beyond it?Praise for Aaron Boothby and Continent

“These poems buckle and drift in ways that reveal their continental scope. They speak from an expansive I, which is less a person or a narrator than a consciousness that reflects on the conquest and settling of the Americas, a consciousness that carries a long historical memory into our troubled time. The I of these poems offers its critical lament, but it never overlooks beauty. It sings with the lushness of the natural world and delivers itself momentarily to joy in the face of a scorched, uncertain future. In language that shifts from lucid imagery to inspired abstraction, the work expresses deep concern for the wellbeing of the planet. Continent reads like a single long poem, and through this extended compositional sweep, the work sustains its pulse and its linguistic pitch.” —Kaie Kellough

“‘By looking I saw land was never empty,’ Aaron Boothby writes in this lacerating and exquisite collection, arguing against colonial capture and entitlement and in favor of each other and the earth. These poems are relentless in their indictment of white supremicist violence, distancing, and self-exculpation; they’re also gorl#"