Overland - by Natalie Eilbert (Paperback)

About the Book

"A collection of poems by Natalie Eilbert"--

Book Synopsis

Part warning, part rumination, Natalie Eilbert's Overland uses snapshots of violence to survey loss of family, of habitat, of consent - the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the skin marked with crescent moons and photographed by a forensic nurse.

Natalie Eilbert's anticipated third collection, Overland, invokes elegy and psalm to speak to assault on the bodies of women and our planet. In a collection that is part warning, part rumination, Eilbert snapshots violence -- the scorch marks on California lumber, the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the crescent moons on skin photographed by a forensic nurse. A chronicling of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and death cycles of the Great Barrier Reef, Overland maps an industry-scarred landscape that travels from coast to coast only to pause on the Congress floor where we are made to recognize: "Disappearance is active loss."

Whether collective or private, environmental or familial, in Overland no loss is overlooked as sestinas and sonnets are interspersed with weary reportage on the power and limits of witness. Here, language is mined--Latin roots are unearthed, ripped apart, and reproduced into anthimeria to describe an industry-obsessed society that is "plasticing"--all while words like "intercourse" and "consent" are named and reclaimed. From the longform associative verse of "The Lake" series, to the two lines of "Gunmetal Gray," Eilbert proves her poetic versatility and stamina, writing in sonic lines as dynamic as the emotions she evokes. We emerge from these poems changed, having learned the truth of the words, "We lose / the world with deliberate focus."

Review Quotes

Praise for Overland

"Eilbert offers an exquisite study bringing themes of nature and climate change to the forefront while also focusing on mental health, grief, trauma, and love. Throughout, she brilliantly tackles today's crises, which she often presents hauntingly, aware that not everyone feels the same sense of urgency."--Library Journal, STARRED review

"Snapshots of everyday life examine environmental devastation, violence, and the complex range of human experience, from the deeply personal to the universal, in Eilbert's elegant third collection. . . . The works in this collection communicate our inextricable and bountiful connection with language. A powerful and striking collection."--Allison Escoto, Booklist

"There is a quiet intensity to this book despite the siren-blaring urgency of what she describes in these pages. Eilbert's verbs, in particular, keep me on the edge of my seat. 'We see the moths // fried to the bottom of bulbs as a lesson in pleasure, ' she writes. . . . Throughout Overland, Eilbert provides an intimate and fierce look at the dread so many of us know all too well, its many precipitators, both internal and external, and illustrates just how tightly the inside and outside are bound."--Diana Arterian, Lit Hub

"Overland wagers it all on our imperfect language, our last best hope for airing experiences so private or suppressed as to feel incommunicable. . . . Language as gift, recognition, unconditional care: this is one of many discoveries Overland perches on, before its perpetually moving thought heads restlessly on."--Christopher Spaide, Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation

"These tender poems examine grief and memory, disasters and light, and nature and science. Some sentences left me breathless. . . . I see myself studying this book--full of wisdom--carefully, scribbling definitions in the margins and handwriting quotes in my notebook."--Book Riot

"Maximalist, elegant, and smart, weaving between the global and the personal, stylistically bringing to mind the world-conscious work of such writers as Jorie Graham and Timothy Donnelly, the linguistically associative poems in Overland read like the unwavering thought process of a single being trying to come to terms with powerlessness."--Michael Dumanis, Poetry Daily

"Eilbert's book is a testament to the act of seeing, of witnessing, of experiencing and still--as in, nonetheless; as in, despite it all--not turning away."--Sarah Kain Gutowski, New York Journal of Books

Praise for Natalie Eilbert

"It would be easy to describe [Indictus] with empty adjectives such as fierce, powerful, or obsessive, but this book is more like an escape room that one might never want to leave."--Victoria Chang, The Tupelo Quarterly

"Indictus is a tour de force. Its anger is unafraid; it owes us nothing and refuses to apologize; it is a chronicle and an agent. Eilbert tempers her words for no one; she too has a truth, and has unmade your mouth so you might listen."--The Chicago Review of Books, Sarah Huener

"Natalie Eilbert's Indictus isn't a timely book. [...] It's ancient and current. Time is meaningless to it."--The Adroit Journal, Jacqueline Krass

"Natalie Eilbert's Indictus is the book of poems I want to be reading in these days. It is the counteragent, the cure, to a world that blames us for being ourselves. It is a book that quickly becomes a place to rest our weary loneliness, to give the unsaid a place to be said. [...] If you are lost, this book says, come home."--Dorothea Lasky

"In this world of broken bodies, Eilbert's tenacity, her sheer drive to get to the end of a thought, to get the words onto the page, conveys a demand: to be honest, to resist, to live."--Daniel Borzutsky

"I have removed all of the Homer from my bookshelves, and Dante, and Milton and Holden Caulfield, too. I trashed them all. In their place, Natalie Eilbert's epic Indictus, the only journey of tribulation and discovery that I regard as true heroism."--Morgan Parker

"Eilbert's array of referents can be dizzying, but her intoxicating language is sure to keep readers under her spell."--Publishers Weekly

"This is the voice of contemporary feminism, brazen, smart, unafraid, and desirous of nothing less than life."--Julie Carr

"Everything happens in [Swan Feast]. Let it happen to you."--The Rumpus

About the Author

Poet and journalist, Natalie Eilbert is the award-winning author of two poetry collections, Swan Feast (2015) and Indictus (2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Prize. In addition to her prize-winning chapbooks, And I Shall Again Be Virtuous (2014) and Conversations with the Stone Wife (2014), her works can be found in POETRY, Granta, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her works engage with systemic power imbalances, social and environmental justice, and climate change, and were awarded the 2021 George Bogin Memorial Prize. Founding editor of The Atlas Review, she is the recipient of a 2021 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in New York, Eilbert is currently based in Wisconsin where she contributes to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA TODAY as a local government and mental health reporter.