Mutual Life

What are the familiar, vital connections that maintain community? What's at stake when those ties are strained to the breaking point by pandemic anxiety, climate disasters, and the politics of resentment? This collection offers a free-ranging chronicle of everyday life during the upheavals of the past few years. Shifting from rural to urban, angry to quizzical, lyrical to conversational, Lowery's poems look for answers in close observation of nearby nature (the honey bee and sandhill crane, "the oak leaf that still holds on"), or the shared rituals of family and personal sustenance. Against odds, these nuanced poems voice hope for the common good-for Mutual Life.