Acclaimed as an essential voice of the American Midwest, David Baker expands both his environment and his form in his eleventh collection. Whale Fall is about time, measured in the wingbeats of a hummingbird or the epochs of geological change, and about place, whether a backyard in Ohio or the slopes of a melting glacier.

In the exquisite, musical title poem, a deft hybrid of eco-poetic alarm and intimate narrative, Baker transports us to the deep sea as a single grey whale carcass falls, decays and is re-inhabited by a cosmos of teeming lives. Among the strands of ocean health, micro-plastics and related calamities of human disregard, the poet weaves in a personal story of chronic illness. The result is a stirring, confident work, astonishing in its emotional acuity and lyric range.

Each poem in Whale Fall is an echolocation, emitting its music to situate itself among others in the vastness of the world. Amidst climate change and catastrophe, as amidst a blooming viburnum or a viral disease, these poems send their songs across empty spaces of a line, a page or a continent, to see who is out there, moving in the depths of being.

About the Author
David Baker's many honors include fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. The recipient of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, Baker teaches at Denison University and lives in Granville, Ohio.


Book Information
ISBN 9781324074687
Author David Baker
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 127g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 155mm * 10mm