PREFERRED INTERNAL LANDSCAPE by Emma Winsor Wood
SKU:
9781942723196
$18.00
$18.00
per item
published September 2025
perfect bound trade paperback
9 x 6 inches, 75 pages
ISBN 978-1-942723-19-6
Press Release: preferred_internal_landscape_downloadable_press_release.pdf
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In Emma Winsor Wood's taut, luminous poems, understanding remains elusive, always just out of reach. In place of wisdom, she gathers facts—assembling a collection of true things that do not quite form truth. Here, structure is unreliable: a bear nests in a man's bedroom, birds mimic the sound of obsolete technology, a cemetery becomes a park, a prison, a church. In a world dictated by algorithms, scripts, and the volatile California weather, Preferred Internal Landscape asks what remains when systems fail-when the power goes out, when syntax collapses, when visibility gives way to fog. These are poems as controlled burn, smoldering with everything they refuse to say.
Praise for Preferred Internal Landscape:
Form as desire, life as content: These elegant documentary poems confess the universal, work at the edges of everyday problems (fog vs. mist, a house without power), and end by denying finality, which is probably the way all things really end. Subtle and startling, Preferred Internal Landscape enacts the slight perspective shift that changes everything, the poet-thought.
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
Emma Winsor Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape cracks me up. In the tradition of Buffam, Shapiro, Bludworth de Barrios, and Seuss, her poems are expansive and critical, intrepid and humorously precise. This is a collection of radiantly discombobulating feminist visions—the illusion of a singular “reality” disrupted by a crisp and prosey “field of view,” a purposefully relational perspective. Wood’s is a poetics for the impatient. In just one turn we experience a whole poem’s allotment of marvel, wildness, care, and goof. In Preferred Internal Landscape we nod along to the speaker’s desire to be “heard more than … understood”; to be seen for an instant before the power goes out.
—Caryl Pagel, author of Free Clean Fill Dirt
A transparent account of opacity, Winsor Wood’s second collection is personal but unsentimental, awed, elevated yet down to earth yet the earth is the almost unearthly redwood and sandstone landscape of Northern California, with which the poet triangulates herself and a rotating cast of interlocutors—voices in the news, her husband—playing the tension of the cords that connect them.
—Sophia Dahlin, author of Glove Money
Praise for Preferred Internal Landscape:
Form as desire, life as content: These elegant documentary poems confess the universal, work at the edges of everyday problems (fog vs. mist, a house without power), and end by denying finality, which is probably the way all things really end. Subtle and startling, Preferred Internal Landscape enacts the slight perspective shift that changes everything, the poet-thought.
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
Emma Winsor Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape cracks me up. In the tradition of Buffam, Shapiro, Bludworth de Barrios, and Seuss, her poems are expansive and critical, intrepid and humorously precise. This is a collection of radiantly discombobulating feminist visions—the illusion of a singular “reality” disrupted by a crisp and prosey “field of view,” a purposefully relational perspective. Wood’s is a poetics for the impatient. In just one turn we experience a whole poem’s allotment of marvel, wildness, care, and goof. In Preferred Internal Landscape we nod along to the speaker’s desire to be “heard more than … understood”; to be seen for an instant before the power goes out.
—Caryl Pagel, author of Free Clean Fill Dirt
A transparent account of opacity, Winsor Wood’s second collection is personal but unsentimental, awed, elevated yet down to earth yet the earth is the almost unearthly redwood and sandstone landscape of Northern California, with which the poet triangulates herself and a rotating cast of interlocutors—voices in the news, her husband—playing the tension of the cords that connect them.
—Sophia Dahlin, author of Glove Money