History of the Future

Carolyn Steinhoff's newest collection revels in both the delight and melancholy of aging without sacrificing the mystery and questions that make it all worthwhile. Steinhoff interrogates the body in relation to the self and to an indifferent world while offering a poignant critique of how quickly new worlds forget the past. "In a country where they're trained to shed / old women like out-of-fashion coats," she writes, "Now that the face is nothing to anyone but a video." And with that, the reader is instructed to never stop asking questions of "the narrow path that is given" by [the] technological colonization of the body. With moments of heartfelt lyricism that connect the reader back to nature, Steinhoff shows us how to resist and push back against all our man-made catastrophes by grounding us in the art of language.

-John McCarthy, Ghost County; Scared Violent Like Horses