Split Rock Press Chapbook Series
ECOLOGY OF THE AFTERLIFE explores the late-Pleistocene and Holocene extinctions of 21 plant and animal species; each poem considers the fate of a different organism—disappearances precipitated in all but two instances by the human diaspora from Africa and mankind’s increasingly ubiquitous environmental impacts. Inspired by the work of early taxonomists like Conrad Gesner (1516-1565 CE), this illustrated volume of poetry incorporates both primary and secondary sources from a surprisingly diverse array of contemporary and historical materials.
PRAISE FOR ECOLOGY OF THE AFTERLIFE
“In Ecology of the Afterlife, Nathan Manley makes what is extinct once again extant; each poem is a living, breathing, moving diorama… We hear several voices: Darwin’s, in the telling of natural histories; in critical attention to detail, Audubon’s; and as Afterlife is eco-writing at its lyrical heart, echoes of Leopold, of his land ethic and his appreciation for the ‘house’ of nature and the flora and fauna—flesh and bone, stem, flower, and leaf—that live in and depend upon it. Ironically, these poems composed with such tangible sensory detail are about vanishings, yet… because Manley’s love of the natural world is distilled in impeccable form, we never, ever forget we are reading beautiful, often elegiac, verse.”
— Brian Palmer, managing editor of THINK Journal
”How do we understand our current relationship to extinction? How do we account for what is gone due to our own, human hands? These poems by Nathan Manley harness the tradition of scientific illustration… to offer fragments of what remains: skulls, wings, and inflorescences point us to the actuality of beings, as well as their meanings to the artist, but can never give us those beings and the artist in the same space and time. Read these poems to learn vivid details; having read them and considered their details, past/present, art/history and so many other false dichotomies are revealed.”
— Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica
NUMINA LOCI, a debut volume, exhausts its pages in the descriptive exploration of landscapes, lightscapes, and recollections of childhood. At its apogee, the collection’s title sequence indulges in imaginative, prayerful evocations of the spirits of place: the hydrogeochemical forces now shaping the arid American West, the tectonic and evolutionary motion of deep time, the plant and animal inhabitants of Colorado’s Front Range, and those diaphanous, elusive presences that make a home a home, or seem to—each invented and in turn revered.
PRAISE FOR NUMINA LOCI
Praise for Numina Loci:
“Nathan Manley's debut collection, Numina Loci, offers the reader a unique and intriguing blend of graphic and magical realism. Indeed, while the synergistic-melancholic canvas is set beneath ‘stars [which] persist in their troubling muteness’ …the poet's language and imagery are rich and articulate, illuminating the mundane in compelling and seemingly transcendent ways.”
— John DeCarlo, author of Walking Through Lebanon
"An illuminating wildfire of aromatic imagery. A dance of constellations. These are the words which hitchhike on the neon glow of lightening bugs. Read on!"
— Aimee Herman, author of to go without blinking