Jonathan Skinner

At once rigorous and casual, conceptual and hilarious, Birds of Tifft offers us a tour through a nature preserve reclaimed from industry. Sometimes our guide reads Tifft like an old-school naturalist, identifying flora and fauna and noting the weather; sometimes he reads it like a contemporary poet, delighting in the visual beauties and ethical ironies of a post-industrial landscape. Ultimately, however, our guide demonstrates that ecopoetics gains its power from inhabiting both positions at once. By neither idealizing nature nor demonizing industry, he shows us our own equal participation in both, and thereby animates a dialectic between “the bittern and the train/the tulip and the dump.” —Brian Teare