To Leave for Our Own Country - by John Linstrom (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The natural world unfolds in ongoing changes of light and violent storms and moments of sheer sunrise and moonlit beauty as patient humans sustain their lives in John Linstrom's lovely collection, To Leave for Our Own Country. These poems are about surviving and sheltering in each other, but they are also about stopping to notice, to remember, to honor, and to mourn the troubling signs of a changing climate. [... ] Love is the abiding force, the glue in the world these poems occupy. ' We love this world so; we pour into it, ' the poems announce. And the love comes in incessant waves, love enough to survive snowstorms and near-drownings and hurricane force winds, love that flows into the poems just as tributaries, wetlands, and river mouths feed the author's home waters of Lake Michigan.- Debra Marquart

Review Quotes

"Though what we commonly consider sacred in religious terms is referenced in this moving and love-filled collection, that tradition is eclipsed by a higher, wider, and more ethereal reach. The poems here provide a record of the poet's always sudden and brief yet bright encounters with that unknown mystical realm--the texture of water as it falls against the shore, the sound of a snapped tree branch, the recollection of a childhood walk to school and the influence of weather on the meaning of such a walk." -- Maurice Manning

"Wise, clear-eyed, and exquisitely musical, John Linstrom's assured debut creates its own weather. Reading TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY, I felt the snow and rain, the welcome sun at the storm's end, the long dark and the long day, the endings that lead--always--to new beginnings, the pure, bright, melodic holiness of the moment and what it might teach us." -- Joe Wilkins

"John Linstrom's elegantly written book of poetry opens our hearts and minds to a cosmic world of spiritual resonance. In this spectacular debut volume, Linstrom moves through geographies and the full liturgical calendar, the full circle of human experience--from love, marriage and parenthood, to loss of elders. He writes of the loss of our environment through climate change and the ways that we can create awareness of our dilemma. Then, through his visionary final poem, he directs us, with his mastery of metaphor, to leave for our own country by another road." -- Mary Swander

"The natural world unfolds in ongoing changes of light and violent storms and moments of sheer sunrise and moonlit beauty as patient humans sustain their lives in John Linstrom's lovely collection, TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY These poems are about surviving and sheltering in each other, but they are also about stopping to notice, to remember, to honor, and to mourn the troubling signs of a changing climate." -- Debra Marquart

About the Author

John Linstrom is the author of the poetry collection To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence, 2024). He is the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Humanities and Social Justice at The Climate Museum, and he is also the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Northwest Review, The Christian Century, North American Review, and elsewhere, and his editions of Bailey's works include The Nature-Study Idea (Cornell UP, 2024), The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion (coedited; Cornell UP, 2019), and The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015).