“There is a thrilling and exacting astringency to Emily Wilson’s new poems, a form of attention that stitches together the ‘spare, sparred and / tender’ things that become perceptible once the space around them is cleared. Promising no pinnacle at which to arrive, Burnt Mountain offers instead a panoply of journeys ‘gullying through the somewhat seen.’ It stands in the bristling between silence and a lavishly threshed-out language, incandescent with the ‘glossy flanges’ of ferns, the ‘sun the chill / blazons in.’ These surpassingly beautiful poems let us feel—even savor—the condition of our own vertiginous precarity.”—Mary Szybist, author, Incarnadine

“Poetry is rarely so alive as it is in Burnt Mountain’s sublime refusal to relegate landscape to object or backdrop. Here, Emily Wilson documents encounters with fern, trail, rock, and woods in untamed rhythms that current ‘Fust-purple glowering green / helleborine’ directly into the reader’s body-mind. With enthralling awareness of ‘the die-cut spiky lichen- / crush and ash,’ this book continues the remarkable ecological vision that Wilson has cultivated across her body of work, redefining what it means for no mountain or weed or flower or human to ever stand alone.”—Karla Kelsey, author, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy

“What a pleasure and privilege it has been for the past quarter-century to witness the dramatic encounters of Emily Wilson’s mind with nature via her singularly exquisite poems. This ‘dark-empaneled’ nature is always adulterated with culture, it is the compromised, damaged nature we know—but Wilson has invented new lenses that bring it closer than it’s ever been before, while simultaneously honoring its essential strangeness. With her terse yet lush lyrics enacting incantatory scenes that glitter with thrilling arrangements of language, Wilson captures emotions, states, and transformations that no other poet can.”—Donna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia