Settling Into Earth by Meredith Devney Mullins

Settling Into Earth is a coming-of-age sketch, one of people and place. It is a snapshot of life-- of the characters we meet, the towns we call home, the subtle complexities we face-- the stirring and settling, the digging and replanting. Mullins takes us through suburban, rural and urban locales to consider the universality of family relationships, gender roles, the ache of growing and loving. This is poetry that doesn't shy away: it sifts through restlessness only to root itself in its beauty.

What are people saying about this book?

With a fine hammer, Mullins splits life open like a geode, revealing its mysteries. Settling Into Earth gives us a sensuous and generous collection of poems. ~Lise Haines, author of When We Disappear

There's so much summertime in these vivid yet atmospheric poems—fireflies and lawnmowers give way to a young couple stealing onions for omelets; childhood gives way to adolescence. This is work that sees to the edge of the periphery and beyond, into the unnamable spaces that make a life. Settling into Earth is making a promise it knows it doesn't intend to keep: we'll root and find comfort here, for sure, but we'll also recall how profoundly unsettling (and how profoundly satisfying) it is to be shown that the world is new once more. ~Drew Perry, author of This is Just Exactly Like You and Kids These Days

In Settling into Earth, Meredith Devney Mullins illuminates our world. Each image, line, and gorgeous poem surprises, and takes our hand, so that we may "walk through waist high buckwheat" into "sunflowers stretching their crowns to the sky." Mullins's poems seize and sing to us, in the truest pitch. Her pages are shot with electricity! ~Peter Shippy(/i>, author of How to Build the Ghost in Your House (Rose Metal Press)