Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award Series

With a peculiar interest in vermin and so-called invasive species, the poems in Nathan Manley’s NATIVE explore Colorado ecology—organisms as grouped and understood in the taxonomies of memory, history, scientific practice, personal experience, and Christian cosmology. Each piece considers a different organism or assemblage of organisms. Ranging from the bunchgrass-stippled flats of the Eastern Plains to the hogbacks and streamlets of the Front Range to the lichened alpine parks of the Rockies, Native touches on the sheer panoply of plant, animal, and microbial life comprising the region’s biotic community. The collection draws on more than 200 years of scientific literature in its project of compiling a poetic ecology to meet the twenty-first century—an age in which mankind has irreparably fractured, shuffled, re-pieced, and transfigured the natural order to an extent that cannot but strike a sympathetic heart with both terror and awe, a reverence for the beauty of a wounded Nature and a vested hope in the holy contiguity of all things.

PRAISE FOR NATIVE

“For sheer musical intensity, local precision and quirkiness of spirit, this book deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Alice Oswald’s Dart or Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior. Paeans to place indeed!  But instead of the waterborne drifting of those poets, Nathan Manley gives us his dusty Western plains, where the foothills of the Rockies begin their rise—there is something charmed about his inhabiting of these places through the full range of their creaturely lives, everything from algae to pronghorns to cutworms to owls. Here it all is, in this beautiful book, while we barely have it still, a loving witness to what we would lose.”
— David Rivard, author of Some of You Will Know

“With Native: Ecology After Settlement, Manley writes of a particular place—Colorado with its various ecosystems—brimming with native animal and plant life, but a place often suffering from the encroachment of destructive outside forces. In these poems, life flashes and pulses with vibrancy, but always nearby things are lying sick, wounded, and rotting. Though we read of myriad organisms that show ‘the world, as it’s always been, is full,’ this fecundity proves ironic, for the prosody here shows Manley at his elegiac best. He blends the empirical and the imaginative, the metaphorical to discover us a nature confronting human progress. In formal verse, he creates a panorama of not only the unsettled natural landscapes of Colorado, but of the whole flaming cosmos.”
— Brian Palmer, managing editor of THINK Journal

“Eco-poet and lawyer Nathan Manley writes in the living traditions and expressionistic lines of a musical poetry with the full eccentricity of the American Eyeball. I'm reminded of Auden's comment that of the English poets only Hopkins, Smart, and Blake were eccentric and individual enough to be American poets—Nathan Manley is the sort of American poet Auden was thinking of. He's an original!”
— David Blair, author of True Figures

“Nathan Manley’s collection, Native: Ecology After Settlement, serves as a poignant meditation on the fragile and often tumultuous relationship between humans and the wild, urging readers to reflect on the impact of their presence and the delicate architecture of trophic interactions. These poems are both scientific and spiritual; they challenge and enchant, while resonating with both the intellect and the heart. Rich with sensory detail and philosophical depth, Manley captures the essence of the natural world while questioning the boundaries of life, myth, and the divine.”
— Crystal S. Gibbins, author of Now/Here and founding editor of Split Rock Review

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

The Mighty Rogue Press Chapbook Series

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 [that] 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