Christopher Kondrich & David Baker — Tread Upon & Transit: Poems -with Sandra Beasley

Tread Upon- by turns tender and furious, and wholly original--attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where "even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, Tread Upon, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. He is also the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.David Baker is the author many books of poetry, including Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019); his Never-Ending Birds was awarded the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is coeditor of Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (2025). Baker’s work appears in APR, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and is included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Baker is Emeritus Professor at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio. He served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.Kondrich and Baker are in conversation with Sandra Beasley, who is the author of four poetry collections: Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize,; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, the John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, and six DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, and the editor of Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. She serves as the poetry editor for Blair, a nonprofit press based in Durham, North Carolina.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781556597244?ic_referral=FgMxNKER8rD8kBv4ilfyXUP-a1F_s5es3SRtntU3cF0wM-mhx2RyFGFEldJIiexHRVr1YVGUUl2jp93u4DQQ4iOepboH8JCtm4YAxknfy87oVoiz3yNwot5EijkAExIoO7WoN_c