We Travel Towards It

by Amy Pence

92 pages, Paperback

Published March 18, 2025

About the author

Amy Pence authored the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely and Armor, Amour as well as the chapbooks Skin’s Dark Night and Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press, 2019). Her hybrid book with Emily Dickinson at its speculative center— [It] Incandescent – (Ninebark, 2018) won the Eyelands International Poetry Award in Athens, Greece. She’s also published short fiction, interviews, and essays in a variety of magazines, including The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers. Red Hen Press will publish her debut novel, Yellow, in 2026. She taught composition and poetry classes for many years, including at Emory, tutored high-schoolers, and is now a freelance tutor in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Dan Corrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been an admirer of Amy Pence’s poetry since reading her *Armor, Amour” and *[It] Incandescent*. Her newly released *We Travel Towards It* continues the adventurousness of her poetry’s varied poetic forms, as well as immersion in richly wide-ranging subject matter. For me as one who is preoccupied with environmental issues, some of the book’s most powerful poems are climate change/eco poems resulting from the poet’s traumatic experience of a towering oak toppled by a violent storm wrecking her home, leaving her to cry “each day for 37 days” and amplifying an empathetic connection with the displacement of others “after Harvey, Irma, after Maria . water glutting the streets . we were stacked in a suites hotel with adjusters and contractors from out of state . entire families with dogs . . . ”: these lines appearing in her poem poignantly titled “Communion”. Her book concludes by asking of our species, “Or was it the spell we were under – / an endless pursuit, grasping at what / was never ours? What made us think / we couldn’t kill a world?” These climate poems sometimes blend metaphorically with another of her themes: sexual aggression and violence. The comparison is that of sexual aggression with ecological aggression. Her poems also are concerned with the natural world, world travel, eroticism, motherhood, mortality. Names touched on in her book reflect her eclectic, ranging mind: Jung, Vivaldi, Kant, Artemesia Gentileschi, Isaac Newton, Jean Lafitte, Keats, Dickinson, Thelonious Monk, Robert Mitchum, Robert Plant, Roger Daltry. Of course, the words themselves are what most matter in poetry, and here is a sampling: “. . . suturing the secrets . . . ”, “. . . as woodstorks rise from a salt marsh . or wild deer find the shade . was I spellbound?”, “I’m reminded / of humankind. Who / said we were kind?”, “Weather: marauder . . .”, “. . . there are places we’ll never enter again . . . ”, “ . . . intimates of time . . .”, “. . . graves open to release the owls we have forgotten . . .”, “. . . trains doppler past . . .”, “The cleft in the birch’s otherworldliness . . .”, “. . . sometimes inhabited by humans, sometimes storyless . . .”, “. . . that humming fool, the harmonica . . .”, “. . . the fig tree . . . its clown hands / flapping with contentment . . .”, “ . . . enter an untimed time, released / from the arbitrary cells you were born into . . . .”

[Hannah Doyle Friday · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book of poems by my dear friend!

[Claire Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Amy Pence's work, I can't help but think of John Muir's remark: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Pence's way into this collection is through a narrative of disruption as she recounts how an oak tree destroyed her home, "splintered & splintering" in its descent; the book itself leverages the experience of dislocation--personal and collective, geographical and spiritual--as she explores a range of topics, including but not limited to Hurricane Katrina, climate catastrophe, childbirth, vestal virgins, Keats' death mask, various forms of animal and botanical life, Roman history, the movement of dreams, the death verses of Zen masters and haiku poets, her daughter’s baby teeth, and the phenomenology of our experience of time itself. This incredibly intelligent, vivid, multidimensional book is not to be missed!