The most prominent, consistent feature of these poems are the heady — even baroque, indulgent — descriptions of the natural world. (I wrote “descriptive” three separate times in my notes.) In “Heath Obscure” Wilson writes of “sumptuary / crumble underfoot” and “the meanly / spangled mollusk grays.” In another poem, “Attention,” Wilson describes “the butte of a stripped / stump // flaring beaded palest / green dotted curled and // cracked.” The plants and rocks and soil envelope the reader; Burnt Mountain (University of Iowa Press) creates a cave into which the reader ventures.
But what really makes this book stand out is that it transcends Romanticism and leans into the weirdness of nature. It uses language to illustrate, maybe even mimic, the patterns and mysteries of the woods. It asks the reader what language is, if not plant or animal. What does it mean to exist? As an additional complication to these questions, Wilson refuses to personify nature. While it encompasses us, it is not us.
Wilson sent me to a dictionary a few times in each of Burnt Mountain’s three sections. Her vocabulary is so rich in biologic terms, I feel like I received an unexpected science lesson. Both sonic and memetic, these poems reach toward the experiential. The poem “Sampler” ends, “Milky pink with minute bristle-scutes the woodfern scrawls / And clashes — depths / Depths come compoundingly / Never end, do and / Where what heaven was was,” pushing the reader to slow down and follow Burnt Mountain’s trail.
The third section of the book, which is under a single title, “Nine Block (Autumn),” fleshes out the volume with more intimate, evocative scenes from autumnal hikes. The speaker surrenders to this mountain and this moment. “Over the road it rigs our mind / into it, turning, touching / the rock points— / the mountain around us.” In the book’s finale, there is no question that Wilson has built this collection in reverence to both what is natural and what is verbal.
I would not ordinarily have chosen this book for myself, and I’m glad that it found its way to me. Burnt Mountain exploded my expectations of nature poetry and reminded me how language can be harnessed to illustrate a journey. In these poems, Wilson prays at the altar of the fern and carries us along beaten and overgrown trails. It is there, surrounded on all sides, where we are left to determine the nature of ourselves.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2026 issue.
