Whale Fall

Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier. In its exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative of illness, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single whale carcass falls, decays, and is reinhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Amidst climate change, catastrophe, and viral disease, each of these poems is an echolocation, emitting its song to the vastness of the world.