"The urgency of the climate emergency is explored in this latest collection by award-winning poet Talya Rubin. It offers recognition of, and salve for, the vast mysteries of the natural world, our human interior, and the relationship between the two. In these poems, human and wild meet in everyday encounters: the melting of ice sheets and fathoming ecological disaster while listening to news reports on the radio; moments of childhood ice skating and unrequited love alongside geological formations and weather patterns. Underlying the collection is a mild sense of absurdity, one that mirrors our existential plight of continuing on in the face of what feels like impossibility.
Iceland Is Melting and So Are You asks us to consider what we have kept frozen and unexamined within us and—in doing so—recognize the complex grief and wonder we face in considering the end of the human epoch."
"St. Kilda is a barren, rocky archipelago 60 km off the west coast of Scotland. In 1930, harsh conditions led the islands’ remaining 36 inhabitants to relocate to the mainland. Left behind were seabirds and a population of feral sheep. In Leaving the Island, her first poetry collection, Talya Rubin enters the isolated lives of those last Kildareans, and probes the “desert places”—to use Frost’s phrase—in herself. Written during a series of extended trips abroad, including stays in Australia and Greece, Rubin’s poems return, again and again, to a psychological landscape where “mud and rock / and sea and salt and oily smell / of fish and fowl is all, all.” Rife with exacting wordplay and frank self-reckonings, Leaving the Island is a book about endings and what remains when we start over."