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 the author of Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. He is also the coeditor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond the Science of Animal Conservation and an associate editor for 32 Poems. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland.

Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They’ve received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Conversation Literary Festival, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, among others. In 2017, Taylor received the Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and the Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published in Fall 2020 with Alice James Books. Taylor lives in southern Louisiana where they listen.