AustLit

'The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth’s history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness landscapes, Earth Dwellers challenges our human-centredness by embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that go back millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us. Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. And asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome, a place where consumption is a relationship and not a right. This is ecopoetry – where the natural world is primary, and humans have to find their place in it, rather than the other way around.' (Publication summary)

'‘Lyric poetry is the lightly orchestrated voice of true feeling. Its shape and its language persuade us, as readers, that soul or spirit has become fully incorporate. In Kristen Lang’s own words, again and again “we are all / this embrace”: all in her gathered moment of love or of loss. She has written of our inevitable transience, “the angels are not ourselves”, but these sure-footed poems locate personal apprehension in a physically delicate, common world. Readers will surely delight in the subtle, varied command of SkinNotes.’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe