[09/15/26] Rees, C.: NOCTUARY

Host Publications, paperback

Publication Date: September 15, 2026

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In this haunting debut, C. Rees immerses us in a landscape of personal and collective loss, where grief is not a process with beginning and end, but a churning ecology we inhabit. NOCTUARY bears witness to its rivers, trees, and lichens, as well as the contamination and exploitation of a rural county where gods “bleed settler dreams into the water- / shed” and “headstones grow […] like parasitoid wasps,” never looking away from our own complicity in “history’s cruel regard.” In these necropastoral nocturnes, the ruin wrought upon this land and the peoples who continue to inhabit it is unburied, as present as "foxes bruised with exhaust."

Through a divinatory poetics, wielding formal trickery, bounding echoes, and polyvocality, these poems unsettle inherited puritanical reasoning, favoring only what can be seen with the nightside eye. A queer necromancy, the poems act as invocations calling back the dead. In Rees’s thrilling “ecto-poetics,” a family’s communal grief teems.

Where memory and story fail, these poems make a ritual of attention, attuning to the charged drift of what moves between lifetimes, transforming occlusions into generative sites of inquiry and encounter. Not in a search for what is factual, but what is fractured, burgeoning, and shared, where “time [binds] us like onion grass.” This book invites us to risk a brush with what is possible, to lower into its lyrical floodplain of lamentation, where we may be bound in a complex keening that, like foxgloves, grows from scattered ash.