Purchase at your favorite independent book seller or online at Small Press Distribution or Amazon.
The Hummingbird’s Tongue
“Vicki Graham is a poet-naturalist supreme, evincing a naturalist’s curiosity—and competence. You’ll get an education in plants, birds, and limnology from The Hummingbird’s Tongue.... Graham loves the names of things, and she loves to make contact with them. She tends to the here and now and she shows us the magic of looking, listening, touching. Her poetic language is as tightly packed and full of life and possibility as a seed. Or to switch metaphors a bit to invoke one of her favorite images, Graham’s words, noun-heavy and verb-slicked, are as carefully placed as the river-smoothed stones she so admires—stones that beckon to the eye, make the river’s sounds, and feel right in the hand.”
-Ian Marshall, author of Border Crossings and Walden by Haiku
“If you enjoy the outdoors, occasional silence, the lives of small and large plants and animals, poems and poems like songs, or simply (!) your own body and spirit, then take some time for Vicki Graham's clear and true wordings.”
-John Felstiner, author of Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
“I love Vicki Graham's new poetry and cling to its deep green calm. Her poems bring light to a question that shadows me, How shall we love a vanishing world? ‘Here. Now,’ she writes. ‘In this moment, on this beach.’ In a time of shattering hearts, hers is a heart that opens instead like a lupine seed, releasing its lustrous, life-filled seeds. This is what art is for.”
-Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Wild Comfort and The Pine Island Paradox
The Hummingbird’s Tongue takes the reader on a journey into the realm of the senses—to the tickle of a tree frog landing serendipitously in the palm, the tang of rosehips on the tongue, or the iridescent flicker of a dragonfly’s wings. In these finely detailed poems, Graham has transformed her understanding of the complexities of biological processes into love songs for the earth—for plants and animals, rivers and mountains, light and stones. A minimalist aesthetic combines with scientific accuracy to bring the reader into sensuous contact with the natural world.