Rush of Wingspan is forthcoming in March 2026 (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and will of course be available globally. Today I’m happy to reveal the cover.

Pre-order here.

Outwards from a northern wilderness childhood these poems thrum musically with intuitive environmentalism in urban, coastal, and boreal forests.

Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems.

Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier’s boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazıl Say performs his Black Earth.

Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, waterthrushes, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier’s focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.