A Slow Green Sleep

Overview

A Slow Green Sleep takes the long view: from the prehistoric through the human historic and on to the posthistoric. Voices speak out of fresh and ancient graves, from the recent and distant pasts, and from some possible and probable futures. Will the human experiment fail, or change? Can we stop loving “the wrongest things,” finding beauty instead in self-effacement and the certainty that the earth will live on without us? Can we come to consider other people, and our nonhuman others, as equal in importance to ourselves? The poems in A Slow Green Sleep use various formal strategies to make resting places where one can embrace how the world is with us today, and how it will be hereafter.

Author Biography

Jonathan Weinert is the author of A Slow Green Sleep, winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, In the Mode of Disappearance, winner of the 2008 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, and Thirteen Small Apostrophes, a chapbook. He is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012). Jonathan has been awarded the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Ucross Foundation, and Caldera Arts. He lives in Stow, Massachusetts.