Songs for
the Land-Bound

violeta garcia-mendoza

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.”

Time bares its metal teeth, tick-ticks the list
of what you could or should have done and been.

Once wilder, now the chimney swift will nest
in any of a house’s narrow pockets—

winged things survive on less sky than you think.

“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 frog song, 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

Audiobook

Media & Mentions

Of Poetry Podcast episode: “Of Midwinter Poems, Rewilding, and Tercets” (December 2024)

Maggie Smith’s For Dear Life newsletter roundup of favorite poetry books of 2024 (November 2024)

Review in F(r)iction by Asma Al-Masyabi (November 2024)

“There is a natural push and pull between the anxiety that comes with living, and the undeniable joy of it. … Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound was a treat to read. It covers a wide lens of subjects and themes but manages to feel concise and deliberate in the stories it tells. Nature, family, and modern life, and the anxiety and joy they stir up take the main stage in this collection, but subtler themes complicate and broaden the reach of the poems. This is an incredible debut that poetry lovers should be on the lookout for.”

Guest essay in Emily Mohn-Slate’s Be Where You Are newsletter, “The Life-Changing Magic of Singing Along” (October 2024)

“I think my first real memory of Violeta … is of the poem that became ‘Soundscape’ in her debut collection, Songs for the Land-Bound, just out with June Road Press. I remember being startled by the line, ‘Call it music, all of it.’ In a poem that includes Minecraft zombie sound effects, hockey play-by-plays, and the toilet running, Violeta created this chaotic collage of sounds, and then with six short words, deemed it all ‘music.’ That line hit me viscerally in the midst of my loud, busy office. What if I called it all music?” 

Sundress Publications: Sundress Reads review by Mia Grace Davis (October 2024)

“The collection is simultaneously tight and far-reaching, continuously wondering about the whys of humanity and attempting to answer them. … There are birds and ghosts, there is absence and hollowness. There is self-exploration and quiet rumination—everything a reader could ask for from a poet.”

Good Creatures interview with Nancy Reddy in her Write More, Be Less Careful newsletter (September 2024)

“Caregiving has made my writing more emotionally weighted (I feel like motherhood especially has turned the volume knob way up on both beauty and panic) and forced me to become more patient with my creative process, and creativity has made me a more fun, curious, and flexible mom. … Getting to inhabit the universe of my children has helped me reshape my creative philosophy.”

The Long Pause interview with Erinn Batykefer, part of her Press Play interview series on creativity (September 2024), plus audio bonus track (October 2024)

“Birds and references to music kept showing up; the page count kept growing, and the poems kept amplifying against each other.  Intentionally and unintentionally, everything I wrote kept spiraling around the themes of love and nature and creativity through the lenses of anxiety and wonder. Those poems ended up becoming Songs for the Land-Bound. The process of writing and putting it together felt invigorating and peaceful at the same time. Like a good deep breath of cold air on a sweaty winter hike. That sense of oooh, this kind of rightness that you feel in your body … this project felt like that.”

Philly Poetry Chapbook Review new poetry titles roundup (September 2024)

Review by Alexis David in The Brussels Review (September 2024)

“Have we turned the natural world into a diorama that we look at, lament, possibly take a photo of and then move on with our human lives? This beautiful book of eco-poetry is asking us to confront both the wonders of the natural world and the grief of all we have lost. 

… What happens to you when you fall in love with a book of poems? It happened to me as I carried this book with me to the quiet forests of upstate New York where my husband and I are building a house. … Language, nature, motherhood, being a land-bound human in this wonder-full world—this collection of poetry articulates both the awe and the grief of the human-and-nature connection. ‘Call it/music, all of it,’ [Garcia-Mendoza] says, as she punctuates silence with birdcall, frog song and the music of our human lives.” 

Check out our launch-week author-editor conversation for a backstage look at the making of the book.

review copies

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