Driving to the Bees

Poetry. In these visceral, lovely poems, Maggie Schwed meditates on farming as both a vocation and a metaphor for creation and self-knowledge. There’s transcendence and bounty here, but the minds at work in these formally inventive poems are too complex and restless to settle for long. Instead, Schwed finds in the difficult lives of animals and the hard work of farming moments for understanding familial love, harrowing violence, accident and unpredictable joy. These lush, constantly shifting landscapes reflect back on us, offering striking revelations about our own moments of human beauty, loss, and inescapable mortality. DRIVING TO THE BEES is a thoughtful and deeply moving collection.–Kevin Prufer