A Northern Spring

Matt Mauch's A Northern Spring transcends genre and form to depict splinters of humanity under the duress of plague and political destruction. Through lyrical prose and poetry, this unique chronicle of spring 2020 navigates what it means to live a fractured human existence in the midst and wake of world demands and individual desires-and needs-for endurance. A Northern Spring begins in Northern Ireland, on the evening when the US president announces that travel has been banned from Europe due to the recently declared pandemic. It ends in a different north that same spring: Minneapolis during the last week of May, a city just learning of and responding to the murder by police of George Floyd. Among many of Mauch's signature capturings of the astonishing brevity of happiness, joy is described as "the mirage of water a playing field ahead of you on a summer road." Indeed, the poet's self-awarenesses continually challenge the too-easy ways humans, cloaked by obligation, duty, and designs for different futures, disregard lived moments-the now-as lesser than. Just as a season, especially in regional spheres enveloped for months in the brutal chill of winter, inspires revolution in its bringing of warmth, its demand of rebirth, A Northern Spring seeks to illustrate, via a poet's navigation of things that feel brand new, a metamorphosing society and world made smaller by reminders of their collective divisions, their collective oneness.