Natural Causes, by Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Natural Causes is a debut collection of 24 poems exploring ecological rhythms of masting, disturbance, molting, and migration. These poems move between elegy and resilient affirmation of life, populated by seeds, birds, wildflowers, and wetlands. Addressing climate grief, extinction, and illness, Natural Causes invites readers to let go of some of the world’s gifts, to embrace others, to wander away from the human world and (maybe) to come back again. These poems are from and about the landscapes of Southern Vermont and Nagajiwanaang, Minnesota. Plaintive, verdant, and determined, Natural Causes wanders through those places, asking what we can keep. These poems bring scientific language into the realms of dreaming, shape-shifting, and fierce longing and love for a changing place. Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer (he/him and she/her) is a plant ecologist and poet from Georgia, now residing in the Connecticut River watershed. Thomas received a BA from Marlboro College and is currently a PhD candidate in Organismic & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Like his poetry, his scientific work focuses on climate change, geography, and plant communities. Her poems have appeared in The Madrigal, Plants and Poetry Journal, The River Heron Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere.