Mirror Lake, Waxen Swan by Victoria Barragan

Mirror Lake Waxen Swan is the product of an elegant collision of found texts, yet its eerie minimalism weighs more than the sum of its parts. This deft and intense poem reads like a long tracking shot through troubled ecologies where the human is entangled with the more-than-human, but never central: ‘widowed crow / hand beckoned’. Resembling haiku in their condensed brilliance – ‘tree branch / under fruit weight’ – these lines tragically feel like the last real fragments we can cling to in our ‘heritage of grief.’ A poem for and of the age of extinction and rebellion. – Scott Thurston