Love in a Time of Climate Change

Love in a Time of Climate Change is Cindy Ellen Hill's fourth published poetry collection. An established poetical voice for the natural environment, in this volume Hill engages the existential threat of our disintegrating natural environment through the radical lens of the heart. Here, the fragility and instability of our relationships mirror the thinning polar ice; dangerously flooded roads invoke the wild rush of an ill-conceived crush; and Mother Earth makes an appearance as a crone stuck in an unhappy marriage with Progress. These poems, from lyrical free verse to artful formality, reflect all the seasons of our love, as they swirl like falling leaves into an uncertain future. Love in a Time of Climate Change has been described Phillip Metres, award-winning translator and author of Fugitive/Refuge, as a prophetic book, "naming us humans as our own willing self-executioners--burning the world up with our own desire, unable to be at home in any real sense of the word." Whether speaking as the oracular Blue Mother (Mother Earth) or as a longing human, Metres says, Hill demonstrates her deftness in both free and formal verse, with shining rhyming sonnets. How much beauty here still is, despite the burning, among the flames.