Land Sparing

The poems in Land Sparing seem to issue from a remnant species of startling, heartbreaking intelligence. “Earth,/ your love spells me. I will rake the path clean.” Remote, at once clear and inscrutable, they signal a loneliness that is planetary in scope. As she shifts registers, Gabriella Klein echolocates us without fail in her exquisite end time.

There’s a bit of the mathematician wandering the spare landscapes of Gabriella Klein’s debut volume of poetry, Land Sparing—and of the scientist, and of the cartographer, too. It’s in the precision of the diction, and it’s in the etched density of the syntax. Even the “colorless light” of oblivion—’Earth, / you are a ghost maker’—gets nailed down.

Earthbound and spare, luminous and tugging at the cosmos, Gabriella Klein’s poems tender the galaxies — of stars and ghost town weathers, of lawless laws and temporality. These are poems scored to a ‘frequency of green ascending,’ enacting a future perfect even as they attend deeply and firmly to the present, to the unfolding possible, the edges always on the cusp of disappearing.