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, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written 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.
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; Sight Lines (2019), for which he received the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024) and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Another collection, The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems, is forthcoming from the Museum of New Mexico Press in spring 2025. A recipient of the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, as well as five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
More books by author
