Tread Upon - by Christopher Kondrich (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Tread Upon--by turns tender and furious, and wholly original--attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.

In this book-length poetic sequence, Kondrich explores the social, political, spiritual, and economic drivers of the chronic devaluation of the living world. Imaginative, visionary, and intensely lyric, Tread Upon challenges our anthropocentric culture and questions notions of individual responsibility amidst corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? Though we begin with a single blade of grass, these poems sprawl near and far, from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich, juxtaposes the intimate and the epic, all while integrating climate research, data, and reporting. In this world, where "Even one blade is a place," the poems reveal that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

Review Quotes

Praise for Valuing

"'I choose to love / as asylum from that which presses me / to hate, '" says the opening poem of Valuing, a rich and vital book by Christopher Kondrich. Lines like these are quite apropos in such a philosophical work of art in which Kondrich questions and embraces both God and pessimism, all the while trying to establish a self--a being worth more than what late capitalism can allow--by chanting what seems like spells born before anyone was born: 'Also, I must capture you in song. I must find music to set to this / aging and follow the river to my death.' There is not space enough for me to write all I love about this book and its potential for influence on poetry and on any mind made vulnerable to poetry."--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

"A stunning work with a one-of-a-kind feel, this reflection on the major issues of self and others demands time and thought, but it delivers. Highly recommended."--Library Journal (starred review)

"Never before have I read a book quite like this. . . . I was floored by Kondrich's ability to seamlessly meld distinct romanticism with larger investigations of human reason and logic-making."--West Branch

"Valuing asks that its readers--as ethical, spiritual beings--attend to this world and to our choices, and offers us a gleaming array of scenarios, descriptions, meditations, and fables from which to begin."--AGNI

"Kondrich's poems feel like hymns released into the sky. Valuing is a refreshingly sincere and skilled book about the ineffable."--The Millions

"Christopher Kondrich's second collection of poetry invites the reader to explore what it means to be human. . . . [He] uses simple, elegant phrasing to illustrate complex philosophical concepts."--The Arkansas International

Praise for Contrapuntal

"In Contrapuntal, an enormously ambitious and masterful debut, Christopher Kondrich has shaped this material into a work of such inventiveness, wit, wisdom, bravura, tenderness and beauty, it leaves me in awe. Or rather, it brings me back to a level of awe I had forgotten I had access to, restoring to their original size my hopes for what a book of poetry might accomplish. I am inordinately grateful for this book."--Timothy Donnelly

"Before the book begins, the book begins, with contrapuntal movement: 'So I take my hand, / and even though I know my hand, / I know I know it, / it feels like your hand.' Throughout the remaining books of this book, a singular duality continues to play, and it is a play of the body, of hands--'I can feel the sounds / between my hands / as I clasp them to play.' In this latter poem, the play on "play" and "pray" is especially apt and emotionally wrought, and--caught up as it is with music, with playing of sounds into emotional sense--such play is both profound and continually delightful. This is a book that needs to be known."--Bin Ramke

"Christopher Kondrich's Contrapuntal is an eerie world of dysymphony and desire, in which the actors have lost their way among objects and senses. Scraps of sound and thought float free, unmoored from belief, and suggest we find a way to bring weight back to the human world. This is a strangely comforting dystopia, pleasing to linger in, a place made of mood and novelistic smoke, the characters in it so clearly our own."--Eleni Sikelianos

About the Author

Christopher Kondrich is the author of three books of poetry, including Tread Upon (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press) and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His poems have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, and have been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. He is currently Visiting Poet-in-Residence* in the MFA Program at the University of Maryland, and a faculty member for Eastern Oregon University's MFA in Creative and Environmental Writing. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives in University Park, Maryland with his family.