‘Among the countless hollowed slopes …’

Eric Forsbergh’s new book, Imagine Morning: Poems of Companionship and Solitude, shows the range of his work, from longer, philosophical and narrative pieces to this brief but measured and precise description of a moment in time:

Meditation On Appalachia Among the countless hollowed slopes of Appalachia, the many tail-ends of valleys wending out from Knoxville, narrowing eventually to paths that vanish into curtained leaves, where, once inside, only dots of sunlight are permitted to speck the forest floor, or creep across the mounds of moss, as slow and imperceptible as deer whose breath is stilled upon the snapping of a branch, the shiny beetle crawls unhurriedly to find the pulpy log’s decay..

You can read more poems from the book here.

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50 Birds for Each of Us

“On any given day,” according to author Thor Hanson in his book Feathers, “up to four hundred billion individual birds may be found flying, soaring, swimming, hopping, or otherwise flitting about the earth. That's more than fifty birds for every human being.”

What will you do with your 50 birds? Perhaps write a poem for each one.—S.Z.