Songs for
the Land-Bound

violeta garcia-mendoza

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.”

Time bares its metal teeth, tick-ticks the list
of what you could or should have done and been.

Once wilder, now the chimney swift will nest
in any of a house’s narrow pockets—

winged things survive on less sky than you think.

“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is lush and painterly, ‘lit with grief and wonder’—a pentimento of personal, national, and global catastrophes. Still, ‘[l]et’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ Garcia-Mendoza urges. In her hands, ‘each vagrant bird’s a herald’; each load of laundry, each internet search, each television show, each ER visit, each walk and hike and drive, each domestic conversation becomes an opportunity for care, and, therefore, for poetry of the best kind. After all, Garcia-Mendoza reminds us, ‘love isn’t the cathedral but the building of it.’ The result of such devotion is poems that are musical and rhythmic, deftly attuned to form and structure; they are simultaneously gorgeous, unforgettable, and deeply right. They are poems that attest to the best, most tenacious, most hopeful parts of us. ‘Even when no seed is guaranteed survival,’ she writes, ‘we must rewild the world yet.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a book to love, to share, to return to again and again.”

—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater

“‘Think of language as some romance / with the unreliable,’ Violeta Garcia-Mendoza writes, or more accurately, thinks, for the poems in this birdsong- and eco-grief-filled debut are ruminative, brooding, and analytical. When I say that Songs for the Land-Bound is punctuated by doubt and recursion, hesitation and questioning, I mean that Garcia-Mendoza is making her way through the apocalyptic terrain of human life amidst climate catastrophe, and she is doing so with appropriately deep care and attention. Love, lockdown, illness, the joys and terrors of motherhood, the internet’s endless scroll: in these wise poems the way we live is situated squarely in the wounded, beloved world. ‘The planet / spins. Inside the tipping light, I voice memo the wind.’ These are messages worth listening to, right now.”

—Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves

“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is a gorgeous spell of a collection, a hushed space where ghosts and grackles are stilled by the poet’s gaze. I felt as if I were reading letters from a wise and honest friend, one attuned to the nuances of winter fog and frogsong, one whose solemn gratitude for the serendipitous good of this world is tempered by the knowledge of its wrongs. Garcia-Mendoza’s virtuosic command of sonic effects links poems about parenting, marriage, chronic illness, and the fragility of the Anthropocene environment. ‘Let’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ she writes in one poem; in another, ‘Let there be meadow.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a meadow humming with life, and an incantation for the preservation of wonder.”

 —Carolyn Oliver, author of The Alcestis Machine and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble

Preorder

This title will be released on September 24, 2024, and we’ll be offering direct preorders closer to that date. In the meantime, you can preorder from our new distribution partner, Asterism Books.