Digging A Moose from the Snow by Skaidrite Stelzer

Skaidrite Stelzer’s chapbook, Digging a Moose from the Snow is an engaging collection of poems that explores our natural environment in a compelling way. All of nature teaches us lessons if we are observant enough. Some lessons are startling, such as when Stelzer takes us to the Copenhagen Zoo where Marius the giraffe is “shot through his head” and “the children’s faces, expressionless, watch the autopsy….” Some lessons are insightful as “Buzzing is the sound of pleasure and dreams,” after the poet points out that “there are no king bees, and we never wonder why.” Then there are Stelzer’s explorations of human nature mixed in with all other animals: “He tells me I walk like an elephant in the rain. Later he will cook tandoori chicken in my grandmother’s oven…” and then we discover later in the poem her poetic meditation, “I’ve always been a seeker of warm rains….” These poems are meant to be “an implanted memory.” In a feat that reminds me of Mary Oliver mixed with Annie Dillard, Stelzer’s chapbook is a vibrant, deep dive into nature revealing all its beauty and blemishes.

–Lylanne Musselman, author of Weathering Under the Cat and It’s Not Love Unfortunately

These wondrous poems present a bestiary of dream animals: startling, haunting, heartbreaking poems. The poet mediates between human and creaturely realms, conjuring the complexities of  “white bone” sea coral, the “opposite world” of bats, a lonely dolphin who swims “from room to room.” The collection is grounded in real-life wildlife and environmental concerns, while at the same time an essential strangeness permeates these poems, which verge on allegory. Stelzer has created a unique and necessary breed of nature poem, one which opens into an enchanted, liminal space between the world of dream bears and  “this office life we flicker into.”

–Barbara Sabol, author of Imagine a Town

“The stars are just used-up light. / Believe in something new.” With one foot firmly in the natural world and the other treading more philosophical waters, Skaidrite Stelzer gifts us poems sticky with bee pollen and shiny with seafoam, a deft mix of sting and affirmation. Digging a Moose from the Snow offers “a world that will kill us” but also reveals “…starfish glitter there, / growing new limbs.”
–Dianne Borsenik, author of Raga for What Comes Next (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019)