“I wonder what life's said to me,” Tiess writes in “Said,” from his third poetry collection that sweeps across the globe and the universe, but begins and ends with a seed called wonder that both honors the magnitude of nature’s abundance and “laud[s] the small,” in equal measure. Tiess’s muse is sandstone, whalesong, squirrel, and heron; “once I had no time or mind for them,” the poet admits in “Nature Preserves,” but now his poetry strives toward redemption, and even salvation, for himself and that baffling collective Tiess worships in his collection: nature.

Rather than attempt to define it, Tiess ogles the natural world in his poetry and expresses lessons learned from dandelions, squirrels, mud, and the cascading sunlight of “Enlightening,” a poem that gushes with feeling and humanity as Tiess strives to see again what’s divine in us. That struggle powers much of the collection, as threaded throughout Tiess’s exaltations of natural grandeur is a bleak awareness of humanity’s violation of our compact with the planet itself. As he notes in the anguished title poem, “yes, even Eden had an edge // a gate // a passage to be crossed once, only once,” Yet, though humanity approaches the edge of our Eden, Tiess’s collection remains optimistic, undergirded by the belief that the solution to humanity’s gluttony is a new identity based in the notion that “prosperity can stem from [...] community.”

Humility is the essential element, according to Tiess, in cultivating a global, as opposed to individual, perspective. Rather than assume the role of conqueror, Tiess writes, “I've tried to be // the leaf that finds // its due place // in the dewy earth // when finished spinning // into wind,” and for Tiess, making poetry and sharing it allows himself and readers to spin into wind and find their places in the dewy earth. With “love, that renaissance beyond all death,” Tiess makes the present sparkle and imagines a future where humanity “let[s] the small things be immense”.

Takeaway: Intimate yet cerebral paean to nature and a call to action for its preservation.

Comparable Titles: Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” Joy Harjo’s “A Map to the Next World”

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A