Traverse

by Kevin Craft

(Lynx House, hardcover, 2024)

Traverse, Craft's third collection, picks up where Vagrants & Accidentals left off, exploring the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life, shape us into the people we become. It's a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee's journey toward self-knowledge, a son's journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed. As such, Traverse maps a new understanding of familial relation, from birth kin to chosen clan, from missing link to known donor children, arcing toward a wider embrace of the generational and archetypal substrates that inform identity, singular and plural alike. What kin are you to me? Craft asks, sifting through uncertainties, genealogies, and the geological record to find a deeper connection to both human and non-human nature, piecing together, step by step, a vision of expansive love, and the fragile ecology in which our lives subsist.

Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and Vagrants & Accidentals (University of Washington Press, 2017). Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 to 2016, he now serves as Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.