Brenda Hillman begins her new book in a place of mourning and listening that is deeply transformative. By turns plain and transcendent, these poems meditate on trees, bacteria, wasps, buildings, roots, and stars, ending with twinned elegies and poems of praise that open into spaces that are both magical and archetypal for human imagination: forests and seashores. As always, Hillman's vision is entirely original, her forms inventive and playful. At times the language turns feral as the poet feels her way toward other consciousnesses, into planetary time. This is poetry as a discipline of love and service to the world, whose lines shepherd us through grief and into an ethics of active resistance. Hillman's prior books include Practical Water and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin Prize for Poetry. Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days is a visionary and critically important work for our time. A free reader's companion is available online at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.

I. THE FORESTS OF GRIEF & COLOR
On a Day, In the World
Whose Woods These Are We Think
All-night Crooked Moonrise over Mountain Pines
The Bride Tree Can't Be Read
Brief Walk at Salt Point Park
For the Lovers Abandoned in Sunlight
During a Suite by Gaspar Cassadó
Beneath a Dying Coast Live Oak
[& heard a humming, like the]
The Forests of Grief & Color
The Before Sleep Kind of Everything
Composition: Fringe Lichen: Tilde & Mãe
Composition: Under Cypresses, Near Big Sur
Of Monarchs Again, Especially the Stripes
So, Bacteria Also Have Their Thunder
Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind
[Untitled Day]
Species Prepare to Exist after Money
Extra Hidden Life, among the Days
Mountain Pond Landscape, in a Drought
As a Sentence Leaves Its Breath
Some Kinds of Forever Visit You
The Bride Tree Lives Three Times
In the Forest of Blue Aptitude
II. NEAR THE RIM OF THE IDEAL
A Short Rhyme for Amiri Baraka
A Summer Song from Old Berlin
Untitled & Translation to Portuguese
Curl of Hair in a Drawer
The Family Sells the Family Gun
Describing Tattoos to a Cop
Chicago Black Friday Protest Near Apple
Crypto-Animist Introvert Activism
To a Life Ended in Winter
Hearing La Bohème after the March
Near the Rim of the Ideal
III. METAPHOR & SIMILE
IV. TWO ELEGIES
The Rosewood Clauses
(An elegy for my father)
Her Presence Will Live beyond Progress
(An elegy for C.D. Wright)
V. TWO PARKS
A Poem for a National Forest
A Poem for a National Seashore
Acknowledgments & Notes