Death fluorescence

Julia Bouwsma's poetry collection, published by Sundress Publications, roams across the natural world, taking in parasitic worms, the anxious habits of mice, and the poet's Jewish heritage. Much of the imagery is drawn from nature in a way that drifts toward the sacred: moons that bleed, apples that seem to haunt the orchard, and a quarry edged with heaped snow. Readers move through the book alongside a speaker who changes over its course. The poems take many forms, including the contrapuntal and the Markov sonnet, and the collection's language is dense and luminous, often lingering on decay and sweetness at once.