Manual for Extinction

Caroline Manring's Manual for Extinction is guided by a sensual mind, one that is sharply aware of mortal outcomes, and a deep sense of the comedy in any of the intellect's know-how attempts. This is rambunctious work, frisky with mordant play and verbal swing; rarely does such vibrant formal innovation couple with a keening grittiness. -Dean Young Operating instructions for a disintegrating world and a field-guide to the vanishing, this startling first book tracks an ecopoetics of systems that persist despite it all. And though Manring fills her pages with the fragility of the animals at our mercy, counting humans among them, she does so with a wry eye and a surprising amount of bounce and zip. Sharp linguistic twists and shifts echo that fragility, and yet, taken as a whole, it's a work that suggests that much might, against all odds, survive. -Cole Swensen Manring's Manual is not a prescription but a generous invitation; it finds its hard lessons in both the absences and singularities of the American landscape. "We must make endings meet/ This is a place called Earth," she writes, and it's true: The only way to fully occupy a home is first to leave it, and the only way to begin life afresh is to trace the route from old roads to new and name each junction with exactness. Manring's gorgeously complex lyric poems offer us a lush and ambitious tour of the human spirit, one whose means of navigation is inimitable and profound and therefore not to be missed. -Seth Abramson Caroline Manring's poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Conduit, H_NGM_N, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently teaches creative writing and environmental literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She lives in Ithaca, New York.