Its surrounding desert is an awful terrain, one that’s been blown up by our Americans in arms, and one that, for many, attracts little attention. Las Vegas was drying out, expanding out, inviting in, its bathtub ring around Lake Mead. I heard the sirens from my patio the night of the Route 91 shooting. I was living two miles from the escalator where Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. The book reflects a shimmering bright city in the desert. I’ve since moved to the Idaho Palouse, a stretch of soft hills blanketed with crops, and I still feel jealous for the harshness and prohibitions of Mojave landscapes.
There, the earth is soft there are junipers and piñon, lava fields, and there are reminders that these things belong to someone-a tribe, a national lab, an agency, a Texan. It is a different desert than the one I grew up with in New Mexico.
More than the vacancy and Joshua trees with which some define this desert, it was my walking, and how that walking felt, that had me thinking. The book is from the Mojave and written in the environments around it. I sought to bring this sense of breadth into Irredenta, my forthcoming book of poems. In something like the Basin and Range area, a stretch of valleys and peaks with little vegetation, the reason for going on, for taking the next step, is not to unravel the mystery of where that next footstep leads between points A and B there is no interruption. The affiliation of meditation with the desert perhaps is that the arid sightlines shrink the world despite their sprawling scope. Time to reflect and see: the creosote, a stocky knotty shrub, waving in the wind the desert trumpets, stems springing from inflated bulbs below and plates of earth that lift the desert to an upward slant, causing vertigo. All landmarks are easy to identify, the grand sweep of the Mojave easy to take in. As you drive it, you see your destination glittering miles up ahead along the ribbon of vanishing pavement. The Mojave is a long horizon flush with broken roads and open for access at all points.
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