Anna Zumbahlen's debut collection Surety traverses memory while attending to the landscape of northwestern Iowa during a year that brought ecopolitical tensions to the surface of daily life in a small town. These poems open the state of mind that produces lyric poetry onto questions of solitude, selfhood, place, and community in a record of generosities, violences, and contradictions. Set in acres planted with corn and soy, lined by roadsides overgrown with thistles and prairie rose, Surety maps intercounty disputes over pollution in the watershed, catalogues seasonal shifts and flora both cultivated and wild, and probes a private loss. This collection locates surety in poetry itself, and in what poetry makes legible in life and love.
Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. Read recent work at www.annazum.com.
