Adaptations

From quiet domestic scenes to sweeping ecological meditations, VA Smith's Adaptations traverses personal grief, cultural reckoning, and environmental crisis, always returning to the question of how we endure and evolve. Adaptation as trope, science, and story is a throughline in this collection. Its title nods both to accommodations to change as well as correcting/resisting a variety of existential, environmental, and historical toxins. In free verse and fixed forms, and in a variety of styles and idioms, a central speaker acts as a Greek/pop chorus, singing songs about an imperiled natural world as well as the tragi-comic adaptations of human being. The collection concludes with a Mobius strip series, "On Evolutionary Adaptability: A Cthulucene, Sonnet Crown." These final poems ask the reader to participate in a decentered human, activist planetary repair rather than adapt to the sufferings of climate-driven doom.