Into the Hush - by Arthur Sze (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze's twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and humans. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force.

Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age--endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change--exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling through the Anthropocene, to "make lines/against a void." Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun, ekphrastic poems, epistles, and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak.

Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark collection. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly, we find cause for praise.

Review Quotes

"Arthur Sze, one of the most acclaimed poets of our time, is celebrated for exploring the natural world, the human condition, and connections between cultures . . . Sze's work invites readers to deepen their sense of place and reflect on the world around them."--PBS NewsHour

"This . . . publication introduces readers to the current US Poet Laureate's bold vision of the world's fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer . . . in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation. . . . Even in its continual replenishing beauty, the collection is eerie, as though these poems were a last attempt to bring order to the disorder of living. 'What in this dawn is yours?' asks one. Perhaps nothing, because 'once lines converge, lines diverge.'"--Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian

"The poetry of Arthur Sze contains wonder and losses; it's there in his latest collection, Into the Hush . . . the natural world and our place in it, human dramas, history."--Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour

"Between the journey and the spark, Sze pauses in Into the Hush, which can take the form of wonder or questioning but its primary form seems to be writing, or language itself, depicted most vividly in the untitled zuihitsu interleaved throughout the collection. Each of its seven segments begins with an image from the natural world, including a hint of human habitation, followed by a single calligraphic gesture performed by two calligraphers working in tandem. . . . With breathtaking economy, Sze's zuihitsu implies a fabric of opposing tensions--human actors in their environment, two writers who both resist and assist each other's writing, and writing in the troubled context of a wounded world, a world wounded by humanity."
--Margaret Lee, American Poetry Review

"Sze conjures explosively vivid images that draw the reader into each poem . . . Into the Hush is packed with poems that unify the human form with nature and dissolve the barrier between the physical body and the natural world."--Hugh Talmage, The International Examiner

"With a mystic's sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, Sze joins disparate realities with . . . poetic bonds of sight and being."--Charles Rammelkamp, London Grip

"Gorgeous and powerful... a collection of formal dexterity and profound empathy, which is most deeply felt through Sze's vivid and precise imagery. Moving through human and non-human perspectives, Sze considers nature, time, and interconnectedness, in elegant and utterly arresting language. I finished this collection with fresh eyes and a renewed love for poetry-reading."--Megan Robson, Poetry Book Society

"The observant and electric Into the Hush by Arthur Sze views any environment, natural or made, as dynamic. A work that acknowledges all the poems that came before to make it possible, the accomplished poet indicates how a narrow field of poetry may offer a wider and deeper view."--Poetry Northwest, Favorites Spring 2025

"Sze's twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe."--Tricycle

"Placing a reader in the immediate realm of the poem, Sze wields the ancient tool of the image to produce ever richer sensory places and ideas. A master practitioner of such conjury, he has been at it for some time, writing calm, structured lines that use universal ways of seeing to reveal boundless scientific and spiritual depths."--Molly Boyle, New Mexico Magazine

"Into the Hush, Arthur Sze's first collection since The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), is another reminder that he deserves the lifetime achievements he's been winning on a yearly basis--and a reminder that a lifetime is only one timescale encompassed by Sze's dimension-bending poems. 'Anvil, ' the book's one-sentence opener, superimposes moments and millennia, stacking up seventeen clauses starting with 'when' 'When a black butterfly flits past, // when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees, // when you smell the sprig of sunrise and walk up to the ditch, // when Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages . . . ' Time's top-heavy weight, Sze's last line reveals, is all raw material for the shaping: 'here is the anvil on which to hammer your days--.' Twelve collections in, Sze is still checking off new forms (zuihitsu, haibun, pantoum), and still devising novel ways to compact global English to lyric proportions. One poem begins with the chemical equation for photosynthesis; another lets an eraser speak, and hush up: 'when you look at th q ck br wn f x j mp d v r th l zy d g and find I've lifted all the vowels loss quickens the world.'"--Christopher Spaide, Lit Hub

"Into The Hush is a book of selfless mastery that engages the reader in its compassionate insights and enlivening music."--Brandon Lamson, Bear Review

"Arthur Sze's latest collection meditates on the extraordinary in the ordinary practice of living. From the haunting violence of the nearly eradicated, as in 'Jaguar Song, ' to the humble 'Farolitos, ' his poems ask the reader to find the 'pinpoints in a greater darkness' that make life remarkable, if not poignant."--2026 Southwest Books of the Year, Pima County Library

About the Author

Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of twelve books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), winner of the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), winner of an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010), and, most recently, The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2025).

A recipient of the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

A Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sze served as the 2023-2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.