A strong tender collection of new poetry from one of our most celebrated poets. Brandt demonstrates yet again her extraordinary range of formal and expressive interests, leading in this case to a stunning series of playful and profound “backyard meditations,” love poems to trees and crows and passersby, to ancestrally rooted presences in the land and in memory, and quirky cosmic reflections on beginnings and endings. A dynamic achievement whose throughlines are uplift and imaginative transformation, a deep sense of “homing,” and forward-looking hope, creative antidotes to the anxieties of our time.  

“Why not spirits emanating / from these stones”? Di Brandt asks in Little Dragons, inviting us to dwell with her “in the vision of birds,” in the vast, deep world that begins in her backyard and extends everywhere. Her own vision is broad as well as deep, challenging even “burly men” to join with her and leave their “grievances and great hurts and rage / and violence behind.” Immersed in her brave words—gentle in their treatment of the world, bold in their trust that its manifold things do indeed speak to us—we may ourselves glimpse the vital spirits that shimmer in these pages.

                           Jeff Gundy, author of Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems

From creation myth to elegy to lullaby to Chickadee song, this series of linked poems puts the Plains back in plainsong.   With hum and warble and cri de coeur, Di Brandt sings our joy and our sorrow through a visionary “re-seeing” of birds and trees, hens and eggs and bison—and cats in the guise of little dragons. This wise, wily, playfully serious poet sings freely to us out of the long Covid silence: all we have to do is listen.                                 

                         Elizabeth Philips, author of The Time of the Great Singing and The Afterlife of Birds
 

Drawing on fifty years of poetics and practice, Di Brandt braids the domestic and the cosmic, the communal and the personal in this collection, so that birds, cats, weather, neighbors and relational memory sparkle with her speaker's attention and grace. Throughout these gorgeously sonic and compassionate lyric poems, Brandt elaborates and augments the new modernist canon she has defined and shaped throughout her remarkable career. In the closing poem, Little Dragons returns to its beginning, where little dragons keep watch - small, fierce, local guardians of a worldview in which care itself becomes cosmology. 

                                Jason Stefanik, author of Night Became Years