This Year, by Julia C. Obert

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The poems in this collection were written between November 2024 and November 2025. They toggle between horror at the violence and cruelty of our contemporary moment and delight in the everyday pleasures of being-in-the-world.

Individually, the poems are interested in the relationships of human beings to the natural worlds we inhabit—in what we might learn from mushrooms, for instance, or in the destructive damming and euphoric undamming of the Klamath River—and in our beautiful and vexed relationships to one another. Together, when splashed across the backdrop of today’s political landscape, “this country for old men, this anti-haven,” they wonder how we might best imagine our collective future.

Ultimately, the collection arrives at a conviction that joy is a form of buoyancy that dwells with grief and pain and that can, as Ross Gay puts it, become a “practice of survival.”

Julia Obert is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Her academic publications include Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry (Syracuse UP, 2015) and The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities: Urban Planning, Imperial Power, and the Improvisatory Itineraries of the Poor (Oxford UP, 2023). Her third book, Irish Joy: Resistant Affects in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture, is forthcoming from Liverpool UP in April 2026. Sometimes she writes poems.