Desert: The Debut Poetry Collection by Eric Larsh.
 
"The work is focused on the Mojave desert, its history and works to trace human development and displacement of peoples and animals. This is explored through the inclusion of bureaucratic and reportage language juxtaposed and blended with the 'poetic' voice of the work. Its form is also meant to mimic and trace the sporadic pockets of life that exist within the desert itself, the white space and text a physical manifestation of the ideas contained within it. This is the beginning of an ongoing longer work that will continue to explore and work to exhaust all avenues of exploration of the desert, physical, spiritual, existential, etc. across multiple books."
 
 
When Ecological Doomerism and Climate Crises Denialism are jointly hoarding the meaning of All Things Earth, All Things Life, people yearn for new modalities of thought and feeling, however speculative those may sound at first. And that is precisely the opening Eric Larsh's DESERT seizes on. Larsh's ecological constructivist poetics brilliantly establishes natura as an urbs ("city" "living space") that we ourselves must passionately tend to. DESERT is a must-read for the revitalization of Eco-Poetics.
 
-Rodrigo Toscano
 
 
Eric Larsh’s DESERT resolutely rakes the human destruction of the ecosphere at the cost of our fellow beings and surroundings. Refusing to be a simple song, this unusual poem, by turns tender and severe, retrieves a habitat of the mind, “atom after atom; working / emotional salt” as “dust and duty” settle into our conscience. In a hard look, the earth is no longer just the earth, and the desert, “that backyard / of the soul,” where the wrestling words are the dry grass “kindling / I save for a fire.” DESERT burns with bruising urgency.
 
-Dong Li