Unbalancing ACT

Unbalancing Act is a haunting collection of poems about the particular physics of loving and losing--about the way grief, desire, memory, and awe can tip a life off its axis, and right it again. The speaker moves through fire and water, childhood, intimacy and abandonment, always with one eye on the natural world: bears, whales, rivers, storms, animals sleeping in impossible ways. The poems are lyric but narrative-driven, often darkly funny, and fascinated--bordering on obsessed--with the strange facts and small surrealities that make ordinary life feel mythic.

At its heart, the book is about imbalance as a kind of truth: the way trauma warps time, the way love can feel like weather, the way the body keeps trying to survive even when the mind wants to disappear. It's a collection for readers who like their beauty a little feral--poems that are tender but not precious, intelligent but not academic, and emotionally sharp without ever losing their sense of wonder.