PUBLICATION DATE: FEBRUARY 15, 2020
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PRESS DESCRIPTION
The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of our own planet’s devastation from climate change. Dystopian and ecopoetic, this collection of poetry examines the impulse—and danger—of the colonial mindset, and the ways that gendered violence and ecological destruction, body and land, are linked. “This time we’ll form more carefully,” one voice says in “Ecopoiesis: The Terraforming.” “We’ve started on empty / plains. We’ll vaccinate. We’ll make the new deal fair.” But the new planet inevitably becomes a canvas on which the trespasses of the American Frontier are rehearsed and remade. Featuring a multiplicity of narratives and voices, this book gives us sonnet crowns, application forms, and large-scale landscape poems that seem to float across the field of the page. Via these forms, Rogers also reminds us of previous exploitations on our own planet: industrial pollution in rural China; Marco Polo's racist accounts of the Batak people in Indonesia; natural disasters that result in displaced refugees.
“Looking into the night sky, the various points of light are far from reach. And yet they, all of them, have held our imagination and our desire for centuries. In The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, the reader becomes as captivated as the speaker-poet. Further, these heavenly bodies become captured by the human body: even as a bit of machinery roves over a surface or ‘Breathing requires violence’ or we meet the likes of Marco Polo. Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers has given us an outpouring of beauty in these elegantly discursive poems. On the anniversary of our footprint on the moon, I believe this collection is a valuable look outward and within.” —Kimiko Hahn
“The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons is formally adroit and innovative, set on Mars at a point in the future when environmental collapse has happened on Earth. Rogers’s striking narrative is a parable of imperialism. It alludes to America’s history of “Curiosity,” exploration, and providence that have too often steered us wrong. As with the best dystopian literature, The Tilt Torn Away from Seasons is timely and urgent, and offers a dire warning for the present—and yet, Rogers’s poems find a way to go out singing.” —Shara McCallum
“In Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’s The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons, a terraformed Mars can only be colonized by those with perfect hearts. Circled by moons named after dread and fear, Rogers seeks a reshaping of language to name the new, the hoped-for, the nearly-possible.” —Traci Brimhall