Forthcoming in 2026 in Illuminations: A Series on American Poestics, editid by Jon Thompson! Suffused throughout with epistolary energies, Figure in a Field is a hybrid text containing poems, erasures, and other works that blur the distinction between poetry and criticism. The pages of this book grow from the deep middle of the country and its prairies, extending its lyric investigations into the pastoral mode, motherhood, and “the protean shapes care will take” as we tend the animacies of a precarious future. Siobhán Scarry is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bethel College, in Kansas. She is the author of the poetry collection Pilgrimly (Free Verse Editions, 2014).
Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash.

