Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
Table of Contents
Part One: Refugia (1) Dear Future Child The Ashram at Leigh Mill Road Guide to Flowering Plants The Trouble with Belief Refugia (2) The Tree Coroners Message in a Bottle from the Sea of Cortez Grail Story Phrases in the Original Unspoken Brief Guide to Epigenetic Memory with Burning Bosque Refugia (3) Paper Trail Equinox Grass Widow In the Air Before Easer
Part Two: Portrait of the Homemaker at Eighteen I Wear Long Skirts for My Own Unwary Pleasure, Refugia (4) Notes to Future Botanists in Search of Conifers The Speaker Reconciles with Spring For the Record Solar Pinholes Gazing on the Mid-Morning in an Expression of Solidarity Refugia (5) Crossing Elwood Pass The Washerwoman Maps Her Body Before Death The Carp Pond Dowsing Refugia (6) Field Notes
Part Three: Rinconada Summer Ends With Ringing Landscape with River Restored to its Historic Channel After 100 Years Refugia (7) Fall Reckoning When We Gathered to Stock up On Light Cusp with Various Visitations Our Names Unfurl Across Winter Refugia (8) Further Phrases in the Original Unspoken Omega Archipelago of Ancestral Bodies and Unnamed Landmarks of the Present Refugia (9) Waveform Origin of the Apple Right of First Refugium
Acknowledgements Notes
Kyce Bello’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, About Place Journal, Anomaly Literary Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Taos Journal of Poetry, and Sonora Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
"In Bello’s tender debut, mothers and children tend to a resilient Earth, even as anxiety about climate change overwhelms the landscape." —Publishers Weekly
"Quietly political... Loving, unsparing visions of Bello’s native and family environments make Refugia both a lament and a song of praise. The poems are arranged in a direct way and are rife with detail, their lines both visceral and accessible." —Foreword Reviews
"Refugia captures the losses, the quiet rage, and the constant, near-overwhelming wonder of life on this very particular planet in this very particular moment, somehow also managing to make amends with the arriving of our almost certainly unfamiliar future." —World Literature Today
