John Lane's poems sing "our rich niche secured by our own pecking," with all the gorgeous ambivalence such a phrase-at once bitterly ironic and genuinely praiseful-reveals. The central nerve of this book is the long, wandering-but-broken poem "Erosion," which shows our cultural and ecological wearing-away but also what connections are revealed in that slough, what bones are unburied, what contradictions are compressed into close proximity. Anthropocene Blues does the vital work of close observation, unsentimental and expansive in scope, that is always the lifeblood of poetry.

-Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Once Removed

For John Lane the blue notes vibrate with deep time resonating in our present dilemmas. He is fully alive to the questions they raise in their freshly seen metaphors, always embedded in the muddy waters of materiality, but inevitably, he knows, mediated by modern technology. Between fox pad and IPad, the poems here pursue a fertile inquiry.

-Terry Gifford, author Whale Watching with a Boy and a Goat

To give our best attention to the natural world might be said to be the duty of any thoughtful citizen of the Anthropocene. But to give it with verve, humor and compassion, to celebrate its small survivals and grieve its losses with large-hearted wisdom takes a poet with the capacious vision of John Lane. Anthropocene Blues is a book to be thankful for.

-Don McKay, author of Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems