What do you think?
Rate this book
Overland
Part warning, part rumination, Natalie Eilbert’s Overland uses snapshots of violence to survey loss of family, of habitat, of consent – the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the skin marked with crescent moons and photographed by a forensic nurse.
Natalie Eilbert’s anticipated third collection, Overland, invokes elegy and psalm to speak to assault on the bodies of women and our planet. In a collection that is part warning, part rumination, Eilbert snapshots violence — the scorch marks on California lumber, the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the crescent moons on skin photographed by a forensic nurse. A chronicling of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and death cycles of the Great Barrier Reef, Overland maps an industry-scarred landscape that travels from coast to coast only to pause on the Congress floor where we are made to “Disappearance is active loss.” Whether collective or private, environmental or familial, in Overland no loss is overlooked as sestinas and sonnets are interspersed with weary reportage on the power and limits of witness. Here, language is mined—Latin roots are unearthed, ripped apart, and reproduced into anthimeria to describe an industry-obsessed society that is “plasticing”—all while words like “intercourse” and “consent” are named and reclaimed. From the longform associative verse of “The Lake” series, to the two lines of “Gunmetal Gray,” Eilbert proves her poetic versatility and stamina, writing in sonic lines as dynamic as the emotions she evokes. We emerge from these poems changed, having learned the truth of the words, “We lose / the world with deliberate focus.”
Natalie Eilbert’s anticipated third collection, Overland, invokes elegy and psalm to speak to assault on the bodies of women and our planet. In a collection that is part warning, part rumination, Eilbert snapshots violence — the scorch marks on California lumber, the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the crescent moons on skin photographed by a forensic nurse. A chronicling of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and death cycles of the Great Barrier Reef, Overland maps an industry-scarred landscape that travels from coast to coast only to pause on the Congress floor where we are made to “Disappearance is active loss.” Whether collective or private, environmental or familial, in Overland no loss is overlooked as sestinas and sonnets are interspersed with weary reportage on the power and limits of witness. Here, language is mined—Latin roots are unearthed, ripped apart, and reproduced into anthimeria to describe an industry-obsessed society that is “plasticing”—all while words like “intercourse” and “consent” are named and reclaimed. From the longform associative verse of “The Lake” series, to the two lines of “Gunmetal Gray,” Eilbert proves her poetic versatility and stamina, writing in sonic lines as dynamic as the emotions she evokes. We emerge from these poems changed, having learned the truth of the words, “We lose / the world with deliberate focus.”
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
Published May 16, 2023
5 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 2, 2023
Sealey Challenge 2023
Book 1
An absolute banger to start off the Sealey Challenge, by one of the best poets writing today.
Book 1
An absolute banger to start off the Sealey Challenge, by one of the best poets writing today.
January 10, 2024
I really wanted to love this especially with all the nods to Alice Notley and Louise Glück, but didn’t feel grounded enough in the enormously heavy themes she explored around death, decay, climate anxiety, violence to both the body and the spaces it moves in. I think hearing it read would keep me more in focus, but also the enjambment is so intentional and the excerpts from other writers that it seems a shame to not see the form. I cannot dispute her images are sharp and as lucid as her tone and they haunt you, but each poem didn’t always cohere for me and neither did the discrete sections either. I did love “If Each Day I Lose Momentum.”
May 23, 2023
I wrote about Overland at Lithub:
In Overland, Eilbert is looking at some of the same themes in Indictus—trauma, sexual violence, family—but, in addition, she brings in the vital thread of the environmental landscape and its multitudinous harms as an element within the emotional landscape. Or, as Library Journal’s starred review states, Overland is “A fine exploration of nature and self in crisis.” Eilbert writes of the
optimism of the lake outside my window.
That it is blue. That it is blue phosphorus
runoff, blue algal blooms, blue-tumored
muskrats slick in blue chemical afterlife.
Then, later, “I see the lightyear ago when I raced to Dad / standing at the door, always the surprise of arms, his jacket’s chemical smell.” What we love—associate with safety, hope—can and does poison us. We can’t trust much. There is a quiet intensity to this book despite the siren-blaring urgency of what she describes in these pages. Eilbert’s verbs, in particular, keep me on the edge of my seat. “We see the moths // fried to the bottom of bulbs as a lesson in pleasure,” she writes.
When Eilbert asks, “is there any house so strong it couldn’t burn?” this is about the Earth, but also, potentially, the self. While she interrogates the impact of a poisoned landscape on the body (cancer, illness, chronic pain, anxiety), the undertones between powerlessness in the face of environmental emergency is subtly set against powerlessness of sexual violence, yearning, loneliness, suicidal ideation and attempts. In short: the complications of having a body—whether yours, or the world around you.
And what does it mean to “have” these things? In her descriptions of suicidal ideation and attempts, I meditated on what it is to kill something precious. The self, the landscape—instantly or by terror-inducing degrees. Both create deep pain in those touched by the loss. With the land, it is, essentially, everyone—even if they don’t know it. This is thus a more complicated circumstance, harder to pin down.
Eilbert, like many Millennials and now Gen Z-ers, describes the difficulty of imagining bringing a child into this world (“The swirl of my daughter’s hair is silken, not there”) alongside her newborn nephew’s existence. “It isn’t clear when it will happen, but the next generation / sounds like a fantasy doesn’t it,” she writes, “why I stare and stare / at my nephew… the paradox of firm, healthy glow.”
I want to continually quote from this collection, as my descriptions feel drab in comparison to Eilbert’s charged language. Throughout Overland, Eilbert provides an intimate and fierce look at the dread so many of us know all too well, its many precipitators, both internal and external, and illustrates just how tightly the inside and outside are bound.
In Overland, Eilbert is looking at some of the same themes in Indictus—trauma, sexual violence, family—but, in addition, she brings in the vital thread of the environmental landscape and its multitudinous harms as an element within the emotional landscape. Or, as Library Journal’s starred review states, Overland is “A fine exploration of nature and self in crisis.” Eilbert writes of the
optimism of the lake outside my window.
That it is blue. That it is blue phosphorus
runoff, blue algal blooms, blue-tumored
muskrats slick in blue chemical afterlife.
Then, later, “I see the lightyear ago when I raced to Dad / standing at the door, always the surprise of arms, his jacket’s chemical smell.” What we love—associate with safety, hope—can and does poison us. We can’t trust much. There is a quiet intensity to this book despite the siren-blaring urgency of what she describes in these pages. Eilbert’s verbs, in particular, keep me on the edge of my seat. “We see the moths // fried to the bottom of bulbs as a lesson in pleasure,” she writes.
When Eilbert asks, “is there any house so strong it couldn’t burn?” this is about the Earth, but also, potentially, the self. While she interrogates the impact of a poisoned landscape on the body (cancer, illness, chronic pain, anxiety), the undertones between powerlessness in the face of environmental emergency is subtly set against powerlessness of sexual violence, yearning, loneliness, suicidal ideation and attempts. In short: the complications of having a body—whether yours, or the world around you.
And what does it mean to “have” these things? In her descriptions of suicidal ideation and attempts, I meditated on what it is to kill something precious. The self, the landscape—instantly or by terror-inducing degrees. Both create deep pain in those touched by the loss. With the land, it is, essentially, everyone—even if they don’t know it. This is thus a more complicated circumstance, harder to pin down.
Eilbert, like many Millennials and now Gen Z-ers, describes the difficulty of imagining bringing a child into this world (“The swirl of my daughter’s hair is silken, not there”) alongside her newborn nephew’s existence. “It isn’t clear when it will happen, but the next generation / sounds like a fantasy doesn’t it,” she writes, “why I stare and stare / at my nephew… the paradox of firm, healthy glow.”
I want to continually quote from this collection, as my descriptions feel drab in comparison to Eilbert’s charged language. Throughout Overland, Eilbert provides an intimate and fierce look at the dread so many of us know all too well, its many precipitators, both internal and external, and illustrates just how tightly the inside and outside are bound.
June 9, 2023
What I appreciate most in Eilbert's book is the thematic intersection between ecological catastrophe and the trauma associated with sexual violence. On one hand, people keep destroying the earth, and the particularities of how we destroy it, the extent of its destruction, should lead someone to feel hopeless. On the other hand, a body that that has been subjected to sexual violence will be effected for the rest of that person's life. It, too, is familiar with hopelessness. This thematic intersection works on a few different levels, and I would argue it's the engine that runs throughout the book. The poet is discouraged by the earth's destruction, but she is also pushing against the headwinds of trauma. There is an inextricability to the body's memory of trauma, and people should recognize the damage we are doing to the earth is also inextricable.
Eilbert is a virtuoso with associative shifts. And the poems that charge ahead with a confident grasp of these dual themes are the poems I will likely teach to. The poems, however, where she dwells on one of the themes, or where I feel like something's being explained to me (the last "The Lake" poem, especially) I don't find all that interesting. And it's not because I don't like poems where the poet is explaining something to me. It's more the stance these poems want me to share with them with regards to the issue of climate change or the anthropocene. Like they carry this "of course, we all feel this way" position, and of course we do all feel this way. I just don't feel like these poems have found that spot that ties me with the poet as she takes me through her thinking on the subject.
Like I want these poems to be mimetic. I want to feel myself thinking with the poet. And I recognize these poems are part of the book's ambition to tell me what informs the poet's understanding of these complex issues, and how her own personal experiences have shaped how she understands a complex issue like climate change. In many ways the book is doing that. And in just a small handful of poems, the didactic presumes some position in its audience that doesn't leave me space to be my own reader. Though as I write that I'm not even sure that's how I would describe my response. But something like that.
Eilbert is a virtuoso with associative shifts. And the poems that charge ahead with a confident grasp of these dual themes are the poems I will likely teach to. The poems, however, where she dwells on one of the themes, or where I feel like something's being explained to me (the last "The Lake" poem, especially) I don't find all that interesting. And it's not because I don't like poems where the poet is explaining something to me. It's more the stance these poems want me to share with them with regards to the issue of climate change or the anthropocene. Like they carry this "of course, we all feel this way" position, and of course we do all feel this way. I just don't feel like these poems have found that spot that ties me with the poet as she takes me through her thinking on the subject.
Like I want these poems to be mimetic. I want to feel myself thinking with the poet. And I recognize these poems are part of the book's ambition to tell me what informs the poet's understanding of these complex issues, and how her own personal experiences have shaped how she understands a complex issue like climate change. In many ways the book is doing that. And in just a small handful of poems, the didactic presumes some position in its audience that doesn't leave me space to be my own reader. Though as I write that I'm not even sure that's how I would describe my response. But something like that.
July 21, 2023
The wrongdoing, the math of it, so often abstract. Or hermetic. I sleep in a dark room where I pretend to sleep and my only light is my seasick joy. It is not right for me to misunderstand. Don’t worry, I only know this now in this undated now that comes before and after reading Natalie Eilbert’s considerate, final, and genetic Overland. If I fail, here, to say what comes during any writing of 'and', please keep at the very least that I almost didn’t make it through the book as I was taken into a particular sadness in thinking on those who will never read it. I guess it is no small thing to feel as a reader that one is in a good soft eye coming upon an egg that will hatch on sight. Overland is a decentering work, a work of shortlisted patience that checks our fictions and does not fake its wrongdoings to relieve relief. Soaked in the desolate allowances of solace that isolate permission, its verse is blessedly always a vowel away from reliving rescue, and it keeps the skull beneath the light bulb long enough to interrogate every ask. It hurts. Earthly boredom, bodily boredom, the boredom of long beings who belong. Eilbert is serious about play and also about play. As in, we can’t use a name that has a name. As in, invention has no mother. I hope you will see these poems, and in the seeing I hope something is placed in the immediately created left hand of a hallucinating birdlike bird. As in, be carried. Its vision is a song to, and to, the loss of our dual invisibility.
July 28, 2023
Overland called me at the library. Made me sit down and begin reading, made me check it out- had to enter my library card number fives times trouble was very worth it, made me want to drop everything else and just read the whole thing for the rest of my precious day to myself. I saved it on a list to buy a copy later when I can afford it, so I can return to it, underline, side line, asterisk, and notes all over it, bend the corners of the pages, post stickers, basically have my way with her words, devour them, in doing so in a way, make them mine.
She is able to bring together so many intertwined aspects of the climate crisis, femininity, violence, change, identity, heritage, genocide, land, money, capitalism, psychology, pollution, children, fear of having children, a shrinking future, and eye colors, and it almost makes it seem futile to try and bring all these topics together out of the format of poetry.
Reading this I felt that she said so many accurate things that float in my brain all day long but I couldn't have made them come out in words nearly as well as she did. She says it all that I shouldn't even bother adding anything more to the topic, yet at the same time, her work offers a gush of inspiration, permission in a way to say the things that I can say, that nobody else has yet said, because there’s always room in between the gaps of poetry lines.
She is able to bring together so many intertwined aspects of the climate crisis, femininity, violence, change, identity, heritage, genocide, land, money, capitalism, psychology, pollution, children, fear of having children, a shrinking future, and eye colors, and it almost makes it seem futile to try and bring all these topics together out of the format of poetry.
Reading this I felt that she said so many accurate things that float in my brain all day long but I couldn't have made them come out in words nearly as well as she did. She says it all that I shouldn't even bother adding anything more to the topic, yet at the same time, her work offers a gush of inspiration, permission in a way to say the things that I can say, that nobody else has yet said, because there’s always room in between the gaps of poetry lines.
October 31, 2023
What a visceral, gut-wrenching indictment of patriarchy, its manifold misogynies, capitalism, and the Anthropocene! Grotesquely gorgeous, these poems are difficult but necessary to read, describing how we humans are staging our own extinction. As we “fail the water,” we commit slow suicide as a species. “That is to say, failure is not the fault of air—“ And as we fail each other in relationships, we render the future pointless. Oh, what it takes to look up!
Favorite Poems:
“Overland”
“In Situ Adaptation”
“Intercourse”
“Green Bay, Wisconsin”
“Caliche”
“Edge Habit”
“Bone”
“The Lake” (wowza!)
“Imaginal Discs”
“Crescent Moons”
“Malignant”
“The Lake” (2)
“Virgin Psalm”
“Fieldwork”
“White Noise”
“Cougar Kill”
“They Do Not Eat Until They Cleanse Themselves”
“Earth (The)”
Favorite Poems:
“Overland”
“In Situ Adaptation”
“Intercourse”
“Green Bay, Wisconsin”
“Caliche”
“Edge Habit”
“Bone”
“The Lake” (wowza!)
“Imaginal Discs”
“Crescent Moons”
“Malignant”
“The Lake” (2)
“Virgin Psalm”
“Fieldwork”
“White Noise”
“Cougar Kill”
“They Do Not Eat Until They Cleanse Themselves”
“Earth (The)”
August 10, 2023
“‘How easy language pretends utility,’ writes poet and journalist Natalie Eilbert in the final of four poems titled "The Lake" in her newest book, Overland. And yet, in this riveting, complex, and moving collection of poetry, Eilbert uses language expertly and adroitly, braiding multiple experiences of violence—physical and emotional and even philosophical—to reveal how humans habitually destroy that which they most need: the environment and each other.”
My review of _Overland_ (which I loved) was published at New York Journal of Books. Visit the link below for the full text:
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
My review of _Overland_ (which I loved) was published at New York Journal of Books. Visit the link below for the full text:
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
November 1, 2023
Read for Poetry with Pat. Doesn’t anyone write poems about fields of flowers anymore? Is everything dead otters 🦦 on the beach? Hard poems that are worth the effort - though you’ll be nothing but bones, feathers, and foam when you’re done. Favorites:
Intercourse
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Stop (it hurts enough)
There Is Hope
Eat and Keep
Crescent Moons
Do Not Intervene
Fieldwork
White Noise
For Seth
Intercourse
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Stop (it hurts enough)
There Is Hope
Eat and Keep
Crescent Moons
Do Not Intervene
Fieldwork
White Noise
For Seth
June 6, 2023
What an absolute miracle of poetry. The studies of self, environment, and community pull together a discordant world. I have been enjoying and thinking of this work since first reading it, consulting it as a partner in navigating my own climate pains.
August 5, 2023
2.5 stars
Just way too bleak for my current state of mind. Inarguably well-crafted, I just couldn't fully appreciate these poems at this moment.
Just way too bleak for my current state of mind. Inarguably well-crafted, I just couldn't fully appreciate these poems at this moment.
August 12, 2023
If giving prose to protecting the planet is counted as a good deed, Overland amounts to a dissertation deserving of Sainthood.
December 26, 2023
A mix of observation, commentary and mourning for a lost brother. It begins with the line "It isn't useful to celebrate being alive." The glass feels 3/4 empty with this lens.
April 19, 2024
So much dexterity and intelligence in these poems, full of verve and nerve and awareness toward how our actions interact and mingle with the world. The poems, too, build an entire world.
Read
August 12, 2024Sealey Challenge 2024 11/31
June 29, 2023
In Eilbert’s third poetry collection, the opening and titular poem, “Overland,” begins, “It isn’t useful to celebrate being alive. / But I’d like to be generous. . . .” In four numbered sections, these tender poems examine grief and memory, disasters and light, and nature and science. Some sentences left me breathless, like this one from “The Lake”: “Never have I been in a weather / more like my moods.” And some sentences gutted me, like this one from “Consultation”: “Nobody was ever / around to guard me like a ghazal.” I see myself studying this book — full of wisdom — carefully, scribbling definitions in the margins and handwriting quotes in my notebook.
from “Reflecting on Spring’s Poetry” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/reflecting-on-sp...
from “Reflecting on Spring’s Poetry” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/reflecting-on-sp...
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews