“’Air’s love language is touch’, Brett Gordon writes in The Art of Shapeshifting, a beautiful collection of poems in which land and air burst into a kaleidoscope of reckonings. As nectarine moons glaze, as a daughter buries a mother, so too does a speaker yearn for places she has never touched, will never touch again: Nectarine moons, Bolivian salt flats, Castelo peacocks bickering in Portugal’s trees. ‘Be like water’, she implores her reader as we dovetail between life and death, redeye flights and bloodroot blooming. As readers, we learn to lean into the grace of Gordon’s ecstasy, a compass which guides us, delights us: ‘As you shift and change to move through the world, the seasons shift with you.’”

—Sara Henning, author of Burn & Terra Incognita