Alice Fogel

I’m a mostly introverted, quiet person, so when I think about what I can do to make a small difference in one aspect of the world that matters to me, I think: well, I’m a writer. And the one thing—which is almost everything—I’m most passionate about is the natural world that is both so powerful and so vulnerable. If a poem makes one other person stop for a moment and say whoa, I never knew there was a kind of shrimp that sees more colors than we do, or that lilies could purposely evolve to be camouflaged, I never saw the humor in raccoons eating the corn I planted, or thought about the dirt left behind around the place where a carrot just was—then maybe that’s one more consciousness brought to wonder and love. So these days, after some other projects, a lot of my poems are returning to their inspirational roots (pun intended?) in nature. Some of the poems show awe at how things live and grow, the endlessly fascinating ways that plants and animals function in relation to each other in their habits and habitats all around us; some reflect more directly on our human connections to those other living entities, what they can teach us about ourselves and what’s beyond and still a part of us; and some are deeply researched descriptions of senses and sensibilities we generally have no idea of even as they surround us. All of the poems I write about nature come from deep personal encounters, whether on wild outdoor adventures, in books or on websites, or in my backyard garden, like these.