Nectar and Small by Jacqueline Balderrama

Jacqueline Balderrama has done just what the founders of the Taft-Nicholson Center were hoping for when they created a place where writers and artists and scholars and students might experience wilderness. The lovely poems in Nectar and Small abound with the wonders to be found there – hummingbirds, sapsuckers, hawks, sandhill cranes. I’m particularly intrigued by the questions they inspire her to ask:  “Will we ever be allowed this kind of being?”

–Jacqueline Osherow, author of My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, Ultimatum from Paradise, and Whitethorn

Jacqueline Balderrama’s poems bore down into the earth to show the great human erasure of our earth, our birds, our water, our trees. But from that deep and dark well, she draws forth the thing humans are best at: making beauty from absence. Like a heron’s wing furled and then unfurled, Balderrama’s poems reveal the stark beauty of this world as it disappears and then, through this grace-giving language, appears again.

–Nicole Walker, co-author of The After-Normal: Brief Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, author of Sustainability: A Love Story, and Where the Tiny Things Are: Feathered Essays

Part memoir, part bird guide, Nectar and Small traces an ever-shifting landscape from California to Montana, where hummingbirds migrate, valley towns are flooded, and hawks vanish, taking flight. Jacqueline Balderrama has given us a map, not only of marshes and mountains, but of compassion and curiosity stretched across them. The urban and natural worlds intermingle as trees are glimpsed through a chain-link fence and a couple avoids single-use plastics. “Something will emerge from the soil,” the speaker contends, contemplating decay, and what emerges are these deeply perceptive and quietly intrepid poems.

–Adam Giannelli, author of Tremulous Hinge