Hagen is a poet who has intimately studied the catastrophe of the present, yet dares to imagine, beyond it, a thriving.
—Michael Nardone, Author of The Ritualities
In stock
Perfect Weather is a collection of poems about many things—about the destabilizing force of climate change, about the particularity of living in the Yukon, about the tender intensity of becoming a parent—but mostly it’s a book about relationships, about the fraught and sustaining nature of building connections with other people. The book opens in a space of high conflict as a wildfire marks out a pattern of relationship breakdown. Later, a fictional series about northern jobs and an interlude about the liminal days of early parenthood lead toward a space of cautious gratitude and peace.
The poems in Jamella Hagen’s astonishing new collection journey through the formidable territory of human relationship where destruction and salvation alchemize. These deft poems examine the pain of the world while holding space for love, presenting the reader with an inverted Pandora’s Box. Perfect Weather navigates the complexity of personhood where “light obscures as much as darkness” and “the air hums with flexed intention”—where one must discard old maps and beliefs in order to find a way forward. Her nimble poetic attention compels us to hear both ‘the sound/ of rain hitting the river, and the river/ rising up’ and understand that we do not merely survive adversity but are the ‘miracles of bad weather’.
—Clea Roberts, author of Here is Where We Disembark and Auguries.
“Jamella Hagen’s Perfect Weather is an intricate, open-hearted ode to change—from the personal to the ecological, from the minute to the massive. With a jeweller’s eye for detail, Hagen sets the natural world in language with masterful precision. Exploring northern hardiness, motherly tenderness, and the search for wholeness with true bravery and insight. I haven’t read a poetry book this moving in years.”
—Michael Christie, author of Greenwood
In Perfect Weather, Jamella Hagen forges a path between “the hot breath our industries exhaust” and “a red glow that singes our dreams,” between “isolated pockets of combustion” and the “symphony of whispers” that calls to us, alerts us from the edges of the wild world. Navigating spruce grove and ocean shoal, swamp grass and the forking paths of tributaries, these poems ponder how we might cultivate kinship across generations in the midst of our social-ecological crisis. They are always in movement, searching for possible spaces of convergence. “We are getting somewhere after all,” she writes, “and fast—we’re almost to the next station which could double as a bomb shelter should we need one.” Hagen is a poet who has intimately studied the catastrophe of the present, yet dares to imagine, beyond it, a thriving.
—Michael Nardone, Author of The Ritualities
