Tread Upon

Tread Upon--by turns tender and furious, and wholly original--attempts to depict the various scales upon which climate change unfolds around us.

Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich's Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where "even one blade is a place," the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

Christopher Kondrich is the author of three books of poetry, including Tread Upon (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press) and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His poems have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, and have been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland. Coeditor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives in University Park, Maryland, with his family.