Winner of the 2020 Moon City Poetry Award
The Land of Stone and River explores the wonder and terror of being human in a world both at its apex (in this period of between the earth’s various traceable ends, anyway) and tipping at the brink of another major extinction event. People are small beings in a vast, ungraspable landscape of geography, time, and disaster—at the mercy of wind, tangled in history, caught in illness that can seem as inexorable as weather, tide, or geology. We persist. And the world with us.
Claudia Putnam lives in Western Colorado. She is a craniosacral therapist and an animal communicator. This is her first poetry collection; individual poems have appeared journals such as Rattle, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, Barrow Street, bosque magazine, and Poetry East. She is the author of the chapbooks Double Negative, and Wild Thing in Our Known World. Her fiction is widely published as well. She has received several residencies, including the Bennett Fellowship from Phillips Exeter Academy.
“Claudia Putnam’s The Land of Stone and River is a terrain of wonder and terror—while it’s the mountainous surround of one person’s life, it’s also a region both godless and governed by many gods, where immense external and internal forces converge, where storms rise out of distances and depths that can never be fully explored. This collection of poems shows us our own hazardous miraculous world, and points, without any pointing-out, to the courage called-for to live in it.”
—Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time
“Claudia Putnam, ‘a strong, straight-backed woman’ in The Land of Stone and River, has revealed a land of grief, drying rivers thinning after a time when ‘you could set your heart on / those 2 PM monsoons. Biblical // lightning, all that water. Now: rusting / ponderosas, centuries old, / disrobing.’ Crow flies throughout these wonderful poems, alive when others are not. The ghosts of Wallace Stevens and other poets abound in the shadows of a dead child in a world of beasts and birds. Putnam gives us elegies for the lost beings in the world, looks closely at mountains and rivers, rocks and Time—eons—and the histories of women and peoples. I love this book.”
—Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems
“The Land of Stone and River, by Claudia Putnam, is a riveting book about wild creatures and the personal wilderness of love and loss in a complicated world. Whether she’s writing about a lynx in Colorado, a teenage girl shot at the border to Nepal, or her own lost baby, the poems are fierce, honest, moving and yes–often hopeful, too. ‘Find the tingle,’ she tells the reader, ‘the race of life/still there.'”
—Susan Terris, author of Familiar Tense
“Telling us ‘these are not/ the best of times/ to be falling asleep’ and arriving just when we need it, Claudia Putnam’s The Land of Stone and River is cinematic in scope, from its opening haiku—the pebble that pulls down the avalanche—to long incantatory pieces as tenderly raw as wind torn wires, reminding us that ‘we are electromagnetic/ beings, animated just as Shelley/ knew, drawing lightning to us.’ At times a flood, the sudden rush of Colorado rapids, at other moments the tender trickle of a stream, this is a book of wounds and the wounded, be it the self or society, lost children or cultural traditions, lovers or the land. And yet it is more, it is a book of mending, of healing, and of redemption. ‘The wind has unknotted/the lilacs’ writes Putnam, ‘What’s shifted is I want to be loved.’ Seeded with heavenly bolts of feminist power, of the creator mother, this is a book of love, and this is a book that will be loved.”
—Matt W. Miller, author of Tender is the River and The Wounded for the Water
“As raw and powerful as a great wind, Claudia Putnam’s The Land of Stone and River is like finally getting to step into the sunlight after having been cooped up far too long. Born of near-unbearable suffering and unspeakable loss, this collection paces back and forth through the corridors of grief, plucking the ineffable from formlessness and shaping it into song. In Putnam’s hands, nature is not that distant, separate entity to be gazed at from the walled off space of the library or drawing room. Nature is in us and around us and of us, and we are of it. From a woman catching a falling eagle and holding it through its death to another woman believing elk are rearing her aborted daughter, The Land of Stone and River is an astonishing, bright presence, that simultaneous slap of wind and burst of sun that affirms ‘No break /really heals’ even as it bestows ‘peace on all who mourn.'”
—Melissa Studdard, author of I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and Dear Selection Committee
Distributed for Moon City Press.
