A triumph of serious poetic play that brings together Dante and the current environmental crisis from Sandra Meek, author of An Ecology of Elsewhere and Still

Using an erroneous etymology from Dante as a springboard, the urgent, darkly comic poems in Bind attend to the music and profound wordplay that emerge from the Sandra Meek's deep attention to place. Set in locales as far-flung as Borneo and as close to home as the rural Georgia college where Meek teaches, Bind grapples with the dilemma of accelerating environmental destruction, which connects us despite political insistence on us-vs.-them divisions. Concerned with wildness and capture, with species on the brink, ranging from the Indri indri of Madagascar to the edible-nest swiftlets of Borneo, the power and pleasure of language here is as tangible as the beauty of the natural world the poet seeks out in all its surviving incarnations.