Entwining Poetry and Place: Mary Newell’s ENTWINE

BlazeVOX [books] is delighted to share new praise and conversation surrounding Mary Newell’s latest collection, ENTWINE. Recently reviewed by Catherine Gonick at Lightwood Press and featured in an in-depth Q&A with Deborah Kalb, Newell’s book continues to spark dialogue about poetry’s role in our ecological moment.

In her review, Gonick highlights how Newell’s poems “invite us to participate in a world where human perception is porous, where the line between self and other dissolves into interspecies interconnection.” Through her attentive observations, of hummingbirds, creeks, birch trees, and the shifting Hudson Highlands landscape, Newell reminds us of both the beauty and the precarity that define the more-than-human world.

The recent Q&A with Deborah Kalb offers readers a glimpse into Newell’s process and vision. Asked about the origins of the book, Newell explains that most of the poems were written over the past two years in the place she has called home for more than a decade: “I live near the Hudson River, at the edge of a woods that extends up to the Appalachian Trail.” This setting provides fertile ground for her ecopoetic inquiry, blending scientific attention, embodied perception, and a spirit of reverence.

For Newell, the title ENTWINE speaks to the mutuality of relation: “Entwinement is an active form of relation where differing life forms or individuals can sustain one another. Many flowers cannot bloom without a pollinator’s touch.” This vision of adaptive co-evolution permeates the collection, and as David Appelbaum observes, her work “gathers, in a mood of ‘adoptive co-evolution,’ the symbols of nature, the murmurings of the heart, and the aspirations of the spirit.”

Beyond poetic craft, Newell’s background in botany, biology, and neuropsychology informs her ecological sensibility. Her studies enrich what she calls “deep inhabitation of a terrain,” an approach that allows her to perceive the hidden continuities and ruptures shaping our shared environment. In her words, ENTWINE is “an ode to this environs, to both its vitality and its precarity, and a query into interspecies relations.”

ENTWINE is available now from BlazeVOX [books]. Readers can enjoy the full review at Lightwood Press and the full Q&A with Deborah Kalb here.