Tread Upon

by Christopher Kondrich

Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place,” the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2026

About the author

Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose most recent books are Tread Upon (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019). His poems appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. He is also the co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and an associate editor for 32 Poems. He is currently Poet-in-Residence for the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

Reviews

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book length poem about climate change, extinction, the world and how we're wrecking it.

from [a blade of grass]: "Are they your children // or an extension of you? Tell me there is a difference. / Tell me that when I plucked you verbless from the rest, // fit you between my thumbs and blew, vibrating / the piece of your body pressed there, that it was not me // whistling, but you singing, you were singing."

from [the wind coming]: "The problem with wind was any problem / we could think of. Its intermittency, its fluctuations // made it impossible to predict. The problem was one minute / it would be turning turbine blades and the next // somewhere else, riling a bay or scattering / stacks of napkins and paper plates. The problem // was property values, was supply, / then demand, then an outdated energy grid, // then the problem with wind was light, the glare / off the turbines."