Maya Khosla
Maya Khosla
Maya Khosla is the Poet Laureate of Sonoma County (2018-2020). Her first book of poetry, Keel Bone, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was published by Bear Star Press. Her chapbook, Heart of the Tearing, was published by Red Dust Press.A field-based biologist and a writer, Maya’s concerns for the natural world have led her through the wild, to the page and to the screen. Her to the screen first film, Searching for the Gold Spot is about the wilds of the American West after wildfire. She is currently working to assess the forests and rivers of California.
All the Fires of Wind and Light
In All the Fires of Wind and Light, Maya Khosla invites readers to find themselves in the wild, even in the most challenging times. Drawing from personal history, ancestry, and explorations ranging from the Bay of Bengal to the Sierra Nevada and beyond, Khosla takes readers into worlds that are all but hidden—and sometimes all but lost. In moments, her work shows a sudden flare of understanding about the sheer scale of fragmentation, even disappearance of our ecosystems. And yet these poems are “fortified by nutrients and hope” in the powers of natural rejuvenation.
“In All the Fires of Wind and Light, Maya Khosla, with her sonorous, attentive voice, creates many beautiful poems by describing the particulars that exist within the world of each. The tone and stance of her lyrical language bestow on each particular—whether commonplace or unique, pitiful or rapturous, insect-tiny or sky-wide—an aura of the miraculous; each individual being, each element is equally mighty in itself and essential to the whole. This aura, so deftly created, can linger like light even after the book is closed.” —Pattiann Rogers, Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry, author of Quickening Fields
“In this moment of time, when we are witnessing the progression of Earth’s seeming destruction through climate change, along with an increased visibility of man’s immoral tendencies, comes a book of poems so lovely in its undertaking, so infused with scientific knowledge and imagistic beauty, that a thousand candles are lit in the cavern of despair.” —Katherine Hastings, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emerita, author of Shakespeare & Stein Walk into a Bar
“Maya Khosla’s dazzling poems in All the Fires of Wind and Light are dense with beauty and wisdom. These poems interweave the splendors and complexities of the natural world with moments of joy and sorrow that reveal human experience to be not separate from, but embedded in, the landscape. Khosla presents climate change and endangered species with precise images and biological accuracy. Fire ecology, a widely misunderstood field, is a central theme. In this collection there is anticipation of catastrophe, but there is also hope: ‘The living are awake / to the profusion soon to follow.” —Lucille Lang Day, coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California