Native by Nathan Manley

Native by Nathan Manley

A poetic ecology of Colorado's mountains and Great Plains, exploring the plant, animal, and microbial lives that shape its character in a century harrowed by human disturbances and stark evolutionary rearrangements.

With a peculiar interest in vermin and so-called invasive species, the poems in Nathan Manley's Native explore Colorado ecology--organisms as grouped and understood in the taxonomies of memory, history, scientific practice, personal experience, and (to a frankly unanticipated extent) Christian cosmology. Each piece considers a different organism or assemblage of organisms. Ranging from the bunchgrass-stippled flats of the Eastern Plains to the hogbacks and streamlets of the Front Range to the lichened alpine parks of the Rockies, Native touches on the sheer panoply of plant, animal, and microbial life comprising the region's biotic community. The collection draws on more than two hundred years of scientific literature in its project of compiling a poetic ecology to meet the twenty-first century--an age in which mankind has irreparably fractured, shuffled, re-pieced, and transfigured the natural order to an extent that cannot but strike a sympathetic heart with both terror and awe, a reverence for the beauty of a wounded Nature and a vested hope in the holy contiguity of all things.