Breath On A Coal - Paperback

Winner of the 2021 Halcyon Award from Middle Creek Publishing

Praise for Breath on a Coal

In Breath on a Coal, Anne Haven McDonnell writes of what is transient and enduring, with intense focus, lyrical precision, and emotional expanse, in poems that are grounded in landscape and 'inscape.' This is a marvelous debut.-Arthur Sze

"Searingly honest, tenderly lyric, exactingly gorgeous. Reading Breath on a Coal, I feel the animal of my body "owling up" into awareness, I put my queer antlers on and wear them proudly, I know more deeply how we can be of a place even while admitting that we are "made of stolen land." What a thrilling debut from a poet who writes from a widely-lived and richly-attended life."
-Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Interpretive Work and Approaching Ice.

"Anne Haven McDonnell's sinuous, lush language captures the transient nature of existence in narratives that combine revelatory beauty with compassionate wisdom. Her deep knowledge of the earth-gathered from countless hours listening to what elk on the mountain might be saying, to what salmon in the riverbed might be whispering-teaches us the ways we are transformed by other living beings. "I put on my antlers in the sun. / I walk through the dark gates of the trees, "
-Todd Davis, author of Coffin Honey and Native Species

"The exquisite poems in Anne Haven McDonnell's Breath on a Coal are concerned with wholeness and intimacy and are made out of direct encounter with the more-than-human world with extraordinary sensitivity and directness. A slug "with its eyes of boneless horns" glistening along a black road like something "just born." Later, a "sunlit blizzard of seed/blowing off cottonwoods." The startling truth of "I forget sometimes/how trees look at me with the generosity/of water." One moment, your attention is caught by riveting textures and meticulous observations of the living world; the next, you find yourself exhaling with an achingly clear grief. The poems in this collection breathe close enough to the coals that meaning flares up in every line. And life rises in all its pain and beauty from these pages."
-Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason

"Anne Haven McDonnell's Breath on a Coal is my favorite kind of environmental writing - a writing that does not privilege the human experience in nature over nature itself. The poems in this collection allow the experience of the More-than-Human to mingle with personal poems of love and loss, allowing the natural to remain silent, while reminding us not to forget that silence "... the whir and clack/ in the country of insects falling// to quiet pieces of shell and wing./ Piles of carapace mute as sand// on the damp ground between grasses." A completely enjoyable read."
-James Thomas Stevens, author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair