Cloud Physics

In her third collection of poetry, Karen Enns ranges over endings of many kinds: cultural, ecological, and personal. But the poems are also replete with affirmations of love, of music and language, and of our rootedness in place and history. Enns describes our predicament with startling and surreal precision, yet also with tenderness and compassion. Her work is unusually wise in the ways of innocence as well as grief. The poems in Cloud Physics need to be listened to as much as read. These are poems informed by music as well as by language. Bells, wind chimes, waves, whispers, medieval chants and orbital winds are part of an untethered longing. There is a sense, in this book, of something loosed–of a fine mind taking in the world and giving back to us something we didn’t know we knew. - Eve Joseph, author of In the Slender Margin