Out Beyond the Land

Book excerpt: Poems on knowledge and nature. Out Beyond the Land refracts the subtle moments in nature where what is seen and unseen twists and loops back, gently nudging the speaker to question how knowledge is formed and memorialized. Using the Latin's "A priori" and "A posteriori" as a starting point, these lyrics work to form a kind of double helix in which the strands of empirical and intuitive knowledge twist and become one. In the silence that follows, the speaker comes to terms with both her attachment to nature's permanence and nature's solid independence from our attachment.