The Next Sky by Sherwin Bitsui

In The Next Sky, history haunts and poems grapple with nostalgia and pain, the ancient and contemporary, to make sense of the places they intersect.

Pulsing with evocative voice and imagery, Sherwin Bitsui’s The Next Sky ruminates on the past, present, and future, questioning where living things fit into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, blackbirds sigh obsidian and the “land whispers its name.” The air is woven by laughter and breath becomes “a knot of lung steam” hidden behind a rib cage. From fragmented and surreal, to haunted and intimate, the poems in this book-length sequence ebb and flow, washing over readers like a wall of rain—fleeting and resonant. As the ancient collides with the modern and temporal, The Next Sky navigates ideas of culture and identity through explorations of land, place, and nature. “Insisting: Dusk is just skin  worn on faces,” Bitsui blurs the line between humans and nature, collapsing what we know of language and time.