Songs for the Land-Bound: Audiobook

“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is lush and painterly, ‘lit with grief and wonder’—a pentimento of personal, national, and global catastrophes. Still, ‘[l]et’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ Garcia-Mendoza urges. In her hands, ‘each vagrant bird’s a herald’; each load of laundry, each internet search, each television show, each ER visit, each walk and hike and drive, each domestic conversation becomes an opportunity for care, and, therefore, for poetry of the best kind. After all, Garcia-Mendoza reminds us, ‘love isn’t the cathedral but the building of it.’ The result of such devotion is poems that are musical and rhythmic, deftly attuned to form and structure; they are simultaneously gorgeous, unforgettable, and deeply right. They are poems that attest to the best, most tenacious, most hopeful parts of us. ‘Even when no seed is guaranteed survival,’ she writes, ‘we must rewild the world yet.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a book to love, to share, to return to again and again.” —Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater

“Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound is a gorgeous spell of a collection, a hushed space where ghosts and grackles are stilled by the poet’s gaze. I felt as if I were reading letters from a wise and honest friend, one attuned to the nuances of winter fog and frogsong, one whose solemn gratitude for the serendipitous good of this world is tempered by the knowledge of its wrongs. Garcia-Mendoza’s virtuosic command of sonic effects links poems about parenting, marriage, chronic illness, and the fragility of the Anthropocene environment. ‘Let’s not devote ourselves to devastation,’ she writes in one poem; in another, ‘Let there be meadow.’ Songs for the Land-Bound is a meadow humming with life, and an incantation for the preservation of wonder.”  —Carolyn Oliver, author of The Alcestis Machine

“‘Think of language as some romance / with the unreliable,’ Violeta Garcia-Mendoza writes, or more accurately, thinks, for the poems in this birdsong- and eco-grief-filled debut are ruminative, brooding, and analytical. When I say that Songs for the Land-Bound is punctuated by doubt and recursion, hesitation and questioning, I mean that Garcia-Mendoza is making her way through the apocalyptic terrain of human life amidst climate catastrophe, and she is doing so with appropriately deep care and attention. Love, lockdown, illness, the joys and terrors of motherhood, the internet’s endless scroll: in these wise poems the way we live is situated squarely in the wounded, beloved world. ‘The planet / spins. Inside the tipping light, I voice memo the wind.’ These are messages worth listening to, right now.” —Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves

“While we may be land-bound in body, in Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s radiant debut, the intellect, the spirit, and the imagination are winged and soaring. Caregiving and language alike are ‘[w]onder-drowned’ as we watch the poet traverse children’s hospitals, riverbanks, kitchens, and her own lush memory. At the periphery of this landscape, always: threat and anxiety, a ‘sorrow-widening light.’ At its center: wilderness and survival, ‘the carrion, the carry on, the carrying.’ These are aching, spacious poems. The poet asks, ‘All this love & what’s my problem? I thought I built my mind for shelter.’ Take shelter in this book. Songs for the Land-Bound urges us to live as a sparrow does, briefly, brightly, and singing.” —Chelsea B. DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place