Not For Luck

Derek Sheffield is the author of Through the Second Skin, finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is coeditor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, poetry editor of Terrain.org, and a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College.

“Derek Sheffield writes with a marvelous dual vision, coalescing details of the natural and human worlds, illuminating moments that sparkle and shimmer within.”—ARTHUR SZE, author of Sight Lines, winner of the 2019 National Book Award “Poetry to make you long for moments in the wild.”—THE MILLIONS“Exquisitely observed, crystalline in its imagery, this book is an act of vision, bringing us the world up close. Keenly attuned to time’s passage and the inevitability of loss, these poems unspool patiently, slowing us down so that we may dwell in “the aggregate beauty of every trout / and star-clotted night.” Like the wood rat in “The Seconds,” Sheffield is a collector, a historian “who would make hill after hill of all the years.” Lucky us.” —ELLEN BASS, author of Indigo and Like a Beggar

• Contents Timid as Any Herd Animal Stewards at Work The Scientists Gather at Mount St. Helens April Aubade The Wren and the Jet at a Research Forest near Fort Knox, Seventy-One Years since the Bombing of Hiroshima, Eight Months since the Photo of a Three-Year-Old Syrian Boy Facedown on a Turkish Beach, His Red Shirt, His Blue Shorts Fish Like These hitch Traveling Again through the Dark Good Girl Daughter and Father in Winter The Math of Two Bedtime Story The Science of Spirit Lake For Those Who Would See Emissaries Emergency First Grade Her Calling Monsters We Could See The Skookum Indian In Nez Perce Country with Kevin A True Account of Wood-Getting from up the Chumstick C-3PO What Happens It Wasn’t the Laundry Exactly What Needs Saying Abortion Wish John Carter of Mars versus the Void Notes, Descending A Song for Today Idaho, Maybe Contextual Education Still Time What Will Keep Us The Empty Road Full of People The Nature of Time Was What They Were Talking About At the Log Decomposition Site in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a Visitation A Moment Ago Her Yarn Opening the Curtains Totality Middle School A Response to a Pair of Forest Plots She Gathers Rocks The Seconds Her Present Acknowledgments