Bind

by Sandra Meek

A triumph of serious poetic play that brings together Dante and the current environmental crisis from Sandra Meek, author of An Ecology of Elsewhere and Still

Using an erroneous etymology from Dante as a springboard, the urgent, darkly comic poems in Bind attend to the music and profound wordplay that emerge from the Sandra Meek's deep attention to place. Set in locales as far-flung as Borneo and as close to home as the rural Georgia college where Meek teaches, Bind grapples with the dilemma of accelerating environmental destruction, which connects us despite political insistence on us-vs.-them divisions. Concerned with wildness and capture, with species on the brink, ranging from the Indri indri of Madagascar to the edible-nest swiftlets of Borneo, the power and pleasure of language here is as tangible as the beauty of the natural world the poet seeks out in all its surviving incarnations.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication January 26, 2027

About the author

Sandra Meek was born in Texas, grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, and has lived in Rome, Georgia, since 1996. Her most recent book of poems, Still (Persea Books, 2020), was named a “New & Noteworthy Poetry Book” by The New York Times Book Review. Of Still, The New York Times writes: “Meek’s prescient poetry has long dwelled darkly on humanity’s environmental impact; in this book, the tone has grown urgent, even apocalyptic.” Her seventh collection, Bind, is forthcoming from Persea Books in January 2027. Other titles include An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea, 2016), Road Scatter (Persea, 2012), and Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008), as well as an edited anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year awards, and two Peace Corps Writers awards (Meek served in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991), she is Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.