The Book of Nature

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009

Read

“The 'nature' of Regan Good's poems is neither benign, nor consoling, nor restorative, nor innocent. It is, instead, a state of 'mortal ignorance,' a theater of elemental combat in which 'the air is the enemy' and 'the hummingbird snags in the thorn bush.' And it is, too, the site from which the human animal bodies forth in full-throated unease, speaking in menaced whispers, furtive asides, and tones—alternately lush and stark—that are not less beautiful for their bereavement.”

—Mark Levine

"In The Book of Nature, Regan Good diagrams, with harrowing precision, the machinations of a savage landscape composed of unequal parts mind and matter, remnants and loss, belief and despair. Stark, wild, unsettling, even frightening, these prose poems find evidence of abomination yet ultimately assert the imagination's compulsion to question and create. The Book of Nature is a fierce reckoning with the elemental forces of language, the physical world, and human will.”

—Suzanne Wise