Loosestrife for Porcupines

Finalist, 2025 Blue Light Book Award

"Loosestrife for Porcupines is a beautifully crafted reflection of the intimacies of the natural world. Here, fiddler crabs raise their machine-gun claws like tiny gangsters. Named and nameless winds begin to stir. Balanced against these appreciations come listable sorrows, from the swollen oceans and the albino crows of Chernobyl to stars disappearing over the shifting bones of an aging planet. Inevitably, Gordon turns to us and asks, without judgement or malice, have we been wise? Craving joy, keenly insightful as they are compassionate, these stunning poems-both individually and collectively-are a timely and necessary gift."

Mary A Koncel, The Last Blonde

About the Author:

D M Gordon's first full poetry collection, Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, while her story, "The Work of Hunters Is Another Thing," won a first prize publication in Glimmer Train. She's a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in fiction, and two-time finalist in poetry. As the editor at Hedgerow Books, she midwifed eleven books into being, several of which were finalists for national awards. Short works in multiple genres have been published widely from The Cincinnati Review to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Poetry Daily. Two linked novels will be published by Sibylline Press-a lost boy among B.C. islands in the sixties, and his grandmother's story as a high-end prostitute in Seattle in the forties.She lives in Western Massachusetts with all manner of critters at the edge of a long field. Find out more at www.dmgordon.com

Reviews

"Seldom do we have the privilege of seeing through eyes so open, so discerning, so disconcerting. Refusing the illusions with which we too easily screen reality, these are poems whose mastery of craft enables their clarity of vision, whose cadenced language and wit enlivens poems that seem written for our threatened time. How I admire their candor, the cool stamina of these poems, along with their warm affection, their knowledge of pasture and parlor, the full keyboard: This is all, nature and art."

Eleanor Wilner, Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017"