Keplinger, David: Ice

Milkweed Editions, paperback Publication Date: August 8th, 2023 Publisher Marketing: In Siberia's Yakutia region, animal remains up to fifty thousand years old have reemerged due to climate change. Ice is an index of findings from the places most buried by time--in permafrost or in memory--and their careful excavations. "I am asking how much more / I have to learn from this," David Keplinger writes. "You are asking that same question." As Earth's ancient ephemera floats to its rapidly liquifying surface, he turns to our predecessors--animal, hominid, literary, and familial. Visitants arrive in the form of Gilgamesh, "searching for a way to stay in pain forever"; a grandmother mending socks, "her face in the dark unchanging"; Emily Dickinson, lingering at her window; a lion cub, asleep in ice for millennia. And alongside these comes a critique of the Anthropocene, of our drive to possess, of our hubris. Ice shelves collapse. Climate change melts layers of permafrost to reveal a severed