Alchemy of Headwinds

In Alchemy of Headwinds, poet and playwright John Macker explores in elegy and lament, in free form heatwaves of prose poetry and haibun, the last five years of life in America. His first major work since 2022’s Belated Mornings, Macker confronts the loss of friends and fellow authors, the fraught nature of pandemic solitude and the raucous and intimate grandeur of the desert Southwest, where he’s lived for the past 30 years.

It’s a book animated by birdsong and wanderlust, it celebrates, with an elder’s hard-earned perspective, themes found in much of his writing over the last 40 years: the wonder of the earth and its natural languages, the border with its stories and lost souls, and the multifarious magics, inherent still, in the ever-evolving terrains between dawn and dusk.

As he writes in his elegy for naturalist/author Barry Lopez: I’m surprised you didn’t take all the/winter birds with you if only for a moment.