Mahalia Smith’s Seed Beetle toes the line between poetry, academia, and novella in verse. Crafting a unique – but not that far from our own – future of climate devastation, Smith’s characters work through forgotten history, corporate overreach, and uninhabitable lands through community, family, and, yes, poetry.

I thoroughly enjoyed stepping into this strange world and was intentionally unsettled by its parallels to our own. The foreword does an excellent job setting the stage of both this dystopia and its characters. Framed chronologically as the lifetime experiences of one particular activist, it covers a range of social and personal events and their resolutions. The tone of the poems changes appropriately throughout these phases too, each section bearing its own particular flavor and style.

The seed beetles, their concept, and their personification were one of my favorite parts of this book, as was the first section about one of Nebula’s mother’s experiences working with the beetles. I have a fondness for sci-fi poetry, and this collection blends a cool idea with a positive message of hope, humanity, and restoration.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Excellent, original, dazzling poetry that tells a story of despair, coercion, and ultimately hope. Utopic Robotics offers a poor community in an environmentally-destroyed place the opportunity for jobs, revitalization, and healing of the land, but it comes, of course, with steep and unexpected prices. The fragmentary nature of many of the poems is perfect for the fleeting thoughts and time of the characters and narrators, and the result is a work I'd love to see taught everywhere. Perfect for book groups and classes, as well as any and all readers interested in climate change, poetry, and narrative.

This book is both beautiful and scary. Poetry that tells the story of a dystopian future, but a future where hope and resistance still live. I really appreciated this book and will be recommended it.

This is a book for readers drawn to liminal forms and layered meanings. For those who appreciate the melancholic surrealism of Severance, the lyrical density of Ocean Vuong, and the urgency of eco-political discourse. Smith’s debut doesn’t just imagine another future, it asks what kinds of futures are still possible, and what it means to care for something fragile when the world is breaking open.

In Seed Beetle, Mahaila Smith delivers a genre defying collection that blends speculative poetry with eco-political urgency. Set in a world unraveling under environmental strain, the text pulses with a quiet tension, lyrical and precise, yet grounded in the physical realities of collapse, resistance, and adaptation.Told through a nonlinear poetic narrative, the collection traces the life of a single figure navigating the aftermath of unchecked industrial decay, all stitched together to create a mosaic of one person’s struggle and persistence. The speaker’s voice evolves in subtle, deliberate ways, mirroring the broader transformation of both body and land.

Smith’s command of form is striking: the language is dense but never inaccessible, and metaphors are layered with meaning without being opaque. Moments of tenderness are balanced with unease, and the speculative elements are imaginative without ever losing emotional weight. There’s a strong sense of lineage in the work, artistic, political, and ecological, that situates it within a long tradition of radical futurisms while still feeling entirely its own.

This is a bold, intelligent debut that rewards close reading. It doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer care, imagination, and a blueprint for how we might think differently about survival and connection in the face of ruin.

Big thank you to Stelliform Press and NetGalley for the ARC!
now everyone please go read this!!