I begin with thanks, and I will end with a poem. In the middle, I will probably ramble a bit.

First thing: I am grateful indeed for the tangible support of the 131 humans who helped Bored Wolves, Lucy Bellwood, and me to crowdfund Serpentine. Also feeling immense gratitude for everyone who’s encouraged me in the form of letters and texts and IRL smiles. And everyone who’s told even one other person, even in passing, about our book. This is how books find their people. (And people find their people.)

How do people find their places, their landscapes, if they are not born to them? This is a question I will leave to your pondering; I’ll go well past the short post I have planned if I try to answer it. I do want to say this: Serpentine is a book substantially concerned with a human finding place, and being found. (I never know how to even approach what a poem or a collection is “about,” but I can get pretty close with this one.)

“The book” is a collection of individual, mostly quite short, poems, all of which emerged from relationship with a large and varied tapestry of land (usually understood as the US state of California), and also with a very small and specific corner of that land.

This last is a particular stretch of the river I call the Serpentine. The title of the book has a nested set of meanings, beginning with that river, and every poem in the book fits one or more of them.

Ki (the river, I mean; ki is the pronoun) is the meandering throughline of the entire collection, even the poems composed far away in other landscapes. Every one was held to this fluid (yet specific, exacting) yardstick, and measured by standards I can hear and taste, but not entirely define.

I can offer, however, a poem that answers slantwise. As all my favorite poems tend to do.