The Eucalypts — Casey Elizabeth Newbegin

$18.00

In her debut collection, Casey Elizabeth Newbegin grapples with the complexity of loving a living person and a dying planet. With sharp, lyrical attention to the natural world, the poems of The Eucalypts express the anxieties of navigating young adulthood under the shadow of the climate crisis. As the poet roves through landscapes pastoral and urban, falling in and out of love with the places and people she meets, she yearns towards elusive visions of belonging and security. When will it be my turn, the poet asks, what world / will be left when it is? Always moving toward resilience, these poems ponder what it takes to sustain, to flourish, and to regrow after disasters both personal and environmental.

Casey Elizabeth Newbegin (she/her) was born and raised in California. She is the author of the crowdfunded chapbook Northern California Lightning Series and her work has previously appeared in The Hollins Critic, Quiddity, Tipton Poetry Journal, Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, and other journals. She works as a fine art insurance specialist and lives with her wonderful husband Nick, sweet baby son Nolan, and their two cats – the old, giant lovebug Scoresby and the young, mischievous dust gremlin Naxos – in Brooklyn, NY. The Eucalypts is her first collection.

In her debut collection, Casey Elizabeth Newbegin grapples with the complexity of loving a living person and a dying planet. With sharp, lyrical attention to the natural world, the poems of The Eucalypts express the anxieties of navigating young adulthood under the shadow of the climate crisis. As the poet roves through landscapes pastoral and urban, falling in and out of love with the places and people she meets, she yearns towards elusive visions of belonging and security. When will it be my turn, the poet asks, what world / will be left when it is? Always moving toward resilience, these poems ponder what it takes to sustain, to flourish, and to regrow after disasters both personal and environmental.

Casey Elizabeth Newbegin (she/her) was born and raised in California. She is the author of the crowdfunded chapbook Northern California Lightning Series and her work has previously appeared in The Hollins Critic, Quiddity, Tipton Poetry Journal, Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, and other journals. She works as a fine art insurance specialist and lives with her wonderful husband Nick, sweet baby son Nolan, and their two cats – the old, giant lovebug Scoresby and the young, mischievous dust gremlin Naxos – in Brooklyn, NY. The Eucalypts is her first collection.

“Consider the Eucalypts: not just their beauty, but their diversity, their adaptability. Consider how they survive fire, flood, and drought, how they co-existed with dinosaurs and still thrive. The question of how to thrive is at the heart of this singular, hard-to-put-down collection. Here is a language that moves toward deep humanness, a language not of personas but persons. The vivid tenderness of these poems and their indelible images bring us into an intimate experience of desire, illuminating both its precarity and its luminous possibilities. If it is bad design that joy resides so close /to anxiety in the nervous system, Casey Newbegin’s poems serve as antidote.”

—Mary Szybist, National Book Award winning author of Incarnadine


“In these sensually alert and emotionally frank poems, the natural world permeates the interior terrains—the sun shines / through us, not on us—in ways that feel both mythic or dreamlike while also urgently intimate and grounded. Moments keen with loss, longing, foreboding, or sudden clarity are here inseparable from the landscapes in which they occur. Newbegin’s vision of interconnectedness, an interdependence of endangered earth and precarious self, provides a fresh path toward healing and love, toward whatever comes next.”

—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Lessons with Scissors

“The Eucalypts is a book of reverence for one’s past, no matter what wagers toward love and home could or could not bear out across time. Each clarity comes at a cost, yet that cost, because it is tended by Casey Elizabeth Newbegin’s rare contemplation and lyricism, is itself a form of abundance.”

—Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go

“I'm supposed to see / you as something separate... how can I help / but become the thing / that surrounds you... The Eucalypts is a lover's vision where intimacy and longing are shaped not just by people, but by every landscape the speaker encounters. In poems that move from gray Oregon skies and Californian rivers to dairy farms and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Newbegin asks how and where love is clarified. These are poems for the in-between seasons between lovers and places, the kind of book you might give a friend who is feeling like it shouldn't be this hard. The Eucalypts imagines a way to gauge the current of the water without having to predict where it leads: My best hope is that we can't tell / the future.”

—Emily Stoddard, author of Divination with a Human Heart Attached