Into the Hush

With imaginative power and emotional force, Into The Hush explores the exigencies of climate change, of endangered cultures, and of our nuclear age.

Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, conjuring a cast of fruit trees and gunshots, butterflies and chemistry, animals and man. Drawing on a craft honed over decades of writing, these poems earn their profound simplicity, moving with imaginative power and emotional force. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of our nuclear age--endangered cultures and the exigencies of climate change--exploring what it means to write on a planet struggling against anthropocene, to ＂make lines/against a void.＂ Here poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrastic, epistle and twin pantoums. Poems borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Writing at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence. Repeatedly we find cause for praise.

Arthur Sze’s eleventh book of poetry, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), was selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award, and his previous book, Sight Lines, won the 2019 National Book Award. A recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lily Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.