Rue (American Poets Continuum, 176)

Kathryn Nuernberger’s third poetry collection infuses fact and folklore with a fiercely feminist ecopoetic soul to reclaim love and resilience in an age of cruelty.

As she continues to explore scientific thought through a poetic lens, Nuernberger turns her gaze to the science and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control. As the speaker, an artist and intellectual, finds herself living through a rocky marriage in conservative rural America, she turns to the hardiest plants around her to survive. Her ethnobotanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne’s lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of pioneering women ecologists.

With a skeptical eye to the stories left untold in textbooks and an unflinching account of patriarchal abuse during an OBGYN exam, Nuernberger scrutinizes the sanctioned history of medicine and marriage. With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reclaims the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.