Recipient of the National Poetry Series Award

National Poetry Series Award

Emily Hiestand, with her radical trust in description as a guide to the moral life—and her

extraordinary trust in the processes of logic—works reason...until it explodes once again into the magic and mystery it truly is.  In Green the Witch-Hazel Wood, the breathtaking hesitancies and suddenly explosive new vantage points of the physics of our time are alive in the poetry.  —Jorie Graham

San Jose Mercury News

A dazzling, engaging book, wherein the chief pleasure is watching the play of Hiestand's

imagination and curiosity.  A bountiful group of superb poems.

Small Press

An instinctively philosophical mind...a painter's eye and a child's verbal playfulness. 

This volume marks the debut of an exceptional talent.    

Belles Lettres

A Wallace Stevens-like palette

 The Boston Review

A vision of human life, and of its most characteristic feature, language, as continuous

with the natural world.

 Derek Walcott

An exact and exacting intelligence which is not based on presumptions, but which arrives at its conclusions with a melodic intricacy.                                                                                        

Eavan Boland, Partisan Review

The remaking of nature poetry is always a challenge within a discourse.  Emily Hiestand seems particularly fit for the challenge... Her poems are full of [the] correspondences and yearnings she observed in Bishop.  Her line is swift, with a lovely, citric vernacular about it. I admire this in particular about her work...a powerful and  gifted stylization within her wider themes. The pleasures of tone make the control in her nature poems a real mix of verve and intensity. These are wonderful gifts to find in poetry.      

                                                                                      Photo: ©2004 Emily Hiestand