Generations

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry

Pattiann Rogers, one of America’s finest contemporary poets, has won a reputation for densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one’s place in it that are informed by a broad knowledge of science.  In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and A. R. Ammons, Rogers’s wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine, exuding much observational care and descriptive panache. Her new collection, Generations, consists of fifty-four poems that concern themselves not just with the notion of the generations of life, but “generations” in the sense of energy, change, replication, and continuity—the entire process of coming or bringing into being.Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wren and The Grand Array; and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry.  She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry.  In 2018 she was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.  She lives in Colorado.