“Attuned to the threats of ecological change and the consequences of human activity on natural landscapes, the poems in Kira Tucker’s stunning debut navigate worlds of loss and renewal. In an impressive array of forms and across a range of places haunted with public history and personal memory—Lynchburg, Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Forsyth County, Georgia—these poems show us the ways that the human impact on the environment has always been intertwined with our history of injustice. There is nowhere we can find a landscape, she writes, unanchored by the roots of our slow ruin. These are poems that ask, where else can we dwell in the given world? Thrilling, elegiac, necessary, Kira Tucker’s Wildest locates that dwelling place in the richness of language, forging a world that finds its strength in the unbroken circle of family, the resilience passed down from the ancestors.”
—Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Kira Tucker’s Wildest heralds a singular voice in American poetry I predict we will need to hear in the far future as much as I need to read these poems today. The subtleties here are astounding, and Tucker’s ability to wield bare vulnerabilities often feel like some peculiar use of a superpower that leads readers to their own vulnerabilities: ‘I tongued the gaps where parts of me / once lay trapped under stubborn skin.’ This is a brilliant debut.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition, winner of the Pulitzer Prize