My Wilderness: Poems

The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner’s threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Excerpt from ＂Dear Maple＂ Nothing will save you now unless the small branches sprouting like a halo from your eight-foot stump take hold. The young women at the Farmer’s Market are already selling the most beautiful turnips, glowing like pearls, and all spring the swale of camas shone blue in the morning light. How can any of us know what will save us?

Maxine Scates is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Undone, Black Loam, and Toluca Street. She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Agni, the New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the Lyre Prize, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and has received fellowships from Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission. She has taught at Lane Community College, Lewis and Clark College and Reed College. Currently, she teaches independently. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.