of god and merriment both, by Anna Lucia Deloia

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

of god and merriment both is a collection of enthusiastic poems. They are love letters to the natural world and efforts to understand how we use language to relate to it. When we are moved by interactions with wild landscapes or non-human life, we so often want to put those experiences into words. Even when we inevitably fail to do justice to what we see and feel, we can’t help ourselves: we try again to describe the delight of feeling connected to beings and perspectives unlike our own. We try again to make sense of the pain we witness and cause. It is a very human form of devotion.
 
Some of the poems in of god and merriment both reflect on poetry itself, and some take inspiration from other ways of using language, like dictionary definitions, field notes, and news headlines. The chapbook is also a tribute to the poet-naturalists Anna has read and learned from, including Mary Oliver, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robert Macfarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Wendell Berry, and many others. These writers model what it can look like to strive against the boundaries of language, and to find meaning (and even joy) in that striving.
 
The poems in of god and merriment both were written on – and celebrate – land in the northeastern United States, where Anna grew up and lives. These areas are the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Massachusett, Wabanaki, and Mohican peoples, and this land was forcibly stolen and remains occupied by the colonizing state. If you are also inspired by the land where you spend time, please consider learning more about the history of that land and contributing to truth-telling and reconciliation efforts in your area.

Anna Lucia Deloia is a White, queer writer, educator, and researcher. She has a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she is co-founder of the intergenerational education initiative Imagining more just futures. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, Paterson Literary Review, and Writers Resist, among other outlets. She is indebted to her family and friends; to the young people she has worked with; and to the many teachers she has found among her colleagues, in books, and in the natural world.