The Way of the Earth: Poems - Paperback

by Matthew Shenoda (Author)

A lyrical collection examines the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis

The Way of the Earth is the fourth collection from award-winning poet Matthew Shenoda. In this, his most personal collection to date, he explores the temporal and fleeting nature of human life and the earth we inhabit. Through ruminations on the intersections of culture and ecology, the death of loved ones, and the growing inequities in our midst, Shenoda explores what it means to be a person both grounded to the earth and with a yearning beyond it. Memories of landscapes and histories echo throughout the sensations of the present: the sight of egrets wading in the marshes, the smell of the ocean, a child's hand nestled in a warm palm. "Time never goes back," Shenoda writes, "but the imagination must."

Author Biography

MATTHEW SHENODA is a writer as well as a professor and chair of the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award. He is the editor, with Kwame Dawes, of Bearden's Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (TriQuarterly, 2017), and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.