Reading Novalis in Montana

“Romantic-environmental poetry of a high order.” —HUFFINGTON POST

This tour de force marks a breakthrough in Melissa Kwasny’s poetic investigation of a collective consciousness.

Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772–1801), a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and more—inform daily life.

Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Throughout, details of lived experience emerge—hiking through the Pacific Northwest, caring for an elder’s great-granddaughter, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship—and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.

Versatile in its forms and expressions, encyclopedic in its comprehension, Reading Novalis in Montana is a virtuoso performance.