Eryn Green’s new collection of poetry BEIT is a lyric examination of the idea of home, and how it intersects with the essential human experiences of love, attachment, and loss. Filtered through a Hebrew sense of the letter Bet—the second letter of the Aleph-Bet, and the root of the Hebrew word for home—BEIT explores the connection between the internal and external worlds of poetic expression and spiritual inhabitation.

The collection includes poems addressing the vast constellation of concerns inherently built into a home—family, romance, protection, loss, tenderness, the fear of violence, and one’s place within the natural world—while asking probing questions of how attentive, poetic care might help us to see our shared spaces more clearly. How does the microcosm of the home relate to the broader macrocosmic physical world? Where does language factor into the relation between the self, the spirit, the other, and the planet? And what can poetry do to assuage our grief at the loss of the people and spaces we love in a universe of unavoidable change?

BEIT wants to know just how big the walls of the home might prove to be, how unexpectedly porous and mercurial, and what tessellated universes can be discovered under their aegis. An ecocritical text, the collection looks with wonder and worry at the landscapes which extend and encroach upon the myriad realms of the self and the world, especially the desert. BEIT is always looking at the world with both feet firmly planted in the dirt, and eyes thrown to the heavens.
 

Eryn Green is assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he also directs the World Literature Program. Green’s first book, Eruv, was selected as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.