Call & Response ~ new and selected poems
Emily Hiestand
Ebb Tide Editions, Spring 2026
Poems in this collection have appeared in Green (recipient of the National Poetry Award, Graywolf Press); in magazines and journals (among them The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Hudson Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southwest Review); and in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Urban Nature, Working the Dirt, and Night Out.
Read selected poems online • Pre-order a print copy
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Reviews for poems included in this collection
”The remaking of nature poetry is always a challenge within a discourse. Emily Hiestand seems particularly fit for the challenge...Her poems are full of the correspondences and yearnings she observed in Bishop…The pleasures of tone make the control in her nature poems a real mix of verve and intensity...These are wonderful gifts to find in poetry.”
— Eavan Boland, Partisan Review
“This is a dazzling, engaging book, wherein the chief pleasure is watching the play of Hiestand’s imagination and curiosity. Constantly, she swings from earth and the quotidian to space and the larger connections of nature... Like Gerard Manley Hopkins…Hiestand praises the diversity of the world.”
— Frances Mayes, San Jose Mercury News
”The new vantage points of the physics of our time are alive in this poetry. It crackles like some source of energy we had no idea we had lived without and now, of course, would not.”
— Jorie Graham, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
Language as continuous with the natural world — ”One of the most valuable things about Hiestand's poems is their vision of human life, and of its most characteristic feature, language, as continuous with the natural world…The attention to detail is both lavish and precise, in keeping with how much is at stake ‘If to render truly is to become.’ The poems simultaneously revel in and question the world of appearances, what we call the ‘real’ world.”
— Sharon Bryan, The Boston Review
An unabashed play with language “This poet aspires to a Wallace Stevens-like palette...A sensuality, an unabashed play with language renders her work distinctive.”
— Lee Upton, Belle Lettres
Defining, broadening the window of reason — These poems are “a foray into logical thought, beginning with the traditional logic of the mind where the world is questioned and observed. ‘Taking Pictures of Ducks’ presents a conversation with Erasmus to raise the essential question: ‘Wise Erasmus, tell me this:/does the window of reason shutter the world?’ Much of the rest of the book is an attempt to define, and broaden, that window of reason. To do so, Hiestand examines the world under a scientist’s microscope, reminiscent of Moore and Bishop before her. There is a parallel logic of the senses. the dominant sense here is sight (Hiestand is also a visual artist) where objects are made palpable. The known world sparkles and comes alive under her observant eye: ‘here is an orange that fits in the palm of your hand/with segments like maps, and sweet, and hard.’ Sometimes the senses are subject to the probing questions of science itself. What is true? What is the nature of perception? This is an interesting turn of mind, and I take away lines that haunt me long after the book is closed.”
— Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review
Cover image: detail of the watercolor “The Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame and St-Laurent at Eu,”1845, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Photo: courtesy of the Tate Museum, London. See the full image at the Tate Images Library.