To Leave for Our Own Country

The natural world unfolds in ongoing changes of light and violent storms and moments of sheer sunrise and moonlit beauty as patient humans sustain their lives in John Linstrom’ s lovely collection, To Leave for Our Own Country. These poems are about surviving and sheltering in each other, but they are also about stopping to notice, to remember, to honor, and to mourn the troubling signs of a changing climate. [… ] Love is the abiding force, the glue in the world these poems occupy. ‘ We love this world so; we pour into it,’ the poems announce. And the love comes in incessant waves, love enough to survive snowstorms and near-drownings and hurricane force winds, love that flows into the poems just as tributaries, wetlands, and river mouths feed the author’ s home waters of Lake Michigan.– Debra Marquart