Axis Mundi

“What got me about the trees today” Axis Mundi begins, and the casual tone gyrates into stunningly beautiful poems that spin above and beyond, infusing consciousness with a sense of the sublime. The creaturely world—mayflies, box turtle, crab, slug—is witnessed freshly, with a naturalist’s passionate accuracy, in lines as glorious as the structures they describe. Nature instructs, consoles, and endangers in these exquisite poems that ask what can be salvaged from beauty and suffering. Axis Mundi shimmers with such revisionary grace, as if seeing justly were a form of worship. Intricate and breathtaking, the book is a harrowing altar to the world’s terrific shapes. —Alice Fulton

Axis Mundi is a book made of elliptical fire and solid architectures. In these Linnaeus-like lyric meditations, the adamantine grasp and the letting of the physical world form the balancing act of this spinning descent and ascension. We fall into the gaze of animals and insects, into mirrors, into this poet’s grounded aerial hunger and grief, teaching us what we know. Like the sweetbriar rose, whose name means both “wounds to heal” and “poetry” these poems are spun from both joy and dread. The result is sheer eloquence, both measured and wild—and a new poet’s voice that is unforgettable and utterly thrilling to encounter. —Carol Muske-Dukes

Impossible to stuff one’s enthusiasm for Axis Mundi into the blurbist’s requisite thimble. Her fondness for daedal details along with her sensitivity to their implications recalls Victoria Sackville-West’s praise for Marvell, who could make a whole poem “tight and hard as a knot” yet “spilling and voluptuous as a horn of plenty.” Her lyrics close wounds of love and loss with their own “intricate / continuous knots,” and her longer meditations turn painful ordeals into delicately wrought memorials. In this collection form and feeling fall in love again and again. —Stephen Yenser

Luscious, lush, lovely—the language in this collection is engaged in a deeply sensuous affair with the
devastating beauties of the natural world. While meditating on the great gifts and the harrowing losses that are the legacy of our fallen estate, Karen Holmberg communicates a profoundly maternal relationship with fellow travelers in all disguises—box turtle, mayfly, slug, nettle—all the while maintaining a clear-eyed vigilance over the inevitable betrayals every living creature, sooner or later, will be obliged to face in this moving and beautiful volume of poems.
—Sidney Wade