Eryn Green

Eryn Green’s new collection of poetry BEIT is a lyric examination of the idea of home, and how it intersects with the essential human experiences of love, attachment, and loss. Filtered through a Hebrew sense of the letter Bet—the second letter of the Aleph-Bet, and the root of the Hebrew word for home—BEIT explores the connection between the internal and external worlds of poetic expression and spiritual inhabitation. The collection includes poems addressing the vast constellation of concerns inherently built into a home—family, romance, protection, loss, tenderness, the fear of violence, and one’s place within the natural world—while asking probing questions of how attentive, poetic care might help us to see our shared spaces more clearly. How does the microcosm of the home relate to the broader macrocosmic physical world? Where does language factor into the relation between the self, the spirit, the other, and the planet? And what can poetry do to assuage our grief at the loss of the people and spaces we love in a universe of unavoidable change? BEIT wants to know just how big the walls of the home might prove to be, how unexpectedly porous and mercurial, and what tessellated universes can be discovered under their aegis. An ecocritical text, the collection looks with wonder and worry at the landscapes which extend and encroach upon the myriad realms of the self and the world, especially the desert. BEIT is always looking at the world with both feet firmly planted in the dirt, and eyes thrown to the heavens.

Winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Eryn Green’s Eruv is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners that includes Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Hass, and as Carl Phillips, competition judge and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, points out, this collection “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented.” Taking its title from the Hebrew word for a ritual enclosure that opens from private into public spaces, Eruv includes poems of love, sadness, and pathos while celebrating the power of ritual and untamed landscapes. Just as a larger home can be fashioned out of communally shared alleyways and courtyards, with passages enabling movement from one world to another, Green’s poems provide a similar doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.