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Make Me Good Soil

Poems of Interconnection

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Make Me Good Soil

By: Sophie Strand, Willow Defebaugh - introduction
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For fans of Ada Limón and Kate Baer, Make Me Good Soil is a luminous, intimate new poetry collection from celebrated author Sophie Strand that explores personal love, loss, trauma healing, and illness through the lens of interspecies connection.

Sophie Strand's poetry is attuned to the too-often ignored truth that human beings are not self-contained, and are rather sustained by vast, living networks beyond their physical selves. Writing through this lens of attention, Strand traces the threads between language and the ecosystems that sustain it, opening poetry itself into a multi-voiced chorus.

Tender yet unflinching, immersive and visionary, Make Me Good Soil invites readers into this interspecies conversation. In an age of increasing isolation and decreasing access to nature, Strand reclaims poetry as a symbiotic exchange—one that nurtures collective connection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of flourishing.

Make Me Good Soil is comprised of 115 poems both brand-new and already beloved by readers, with a foreword from Willow Defebaugh, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning climate and culture magazine Atmos.

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Critics' reviews

“Sometimes the only true thing is a poem. In this luminous collection, Sophie Strand’s uncommon genius takes root in the soil of the body. It is a love song to Mother Earth, lament for the ravages of illness, equal homage to science and magic. I read this book like an oracle. I am setting my compass by Sophie’s star.” —Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy and Ordinary Mysticism
“Sophie Strand's collection of poetry, Make Me Good Soil, is spellbinding. I would have read it one short, ecstatic sitting had I not wanted to savor the magic. The love and reverence Sophie has for the mysteries the world bursts out of every poem. Each piece is a realm unto itself; ethereal places where animals, fungi, plants, and microbes all converge to shape and inform the human experience. You will feel more enchanted with the world upon reading this.” —Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, author of Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
“Sophie Strand is not just a poet, she’s a kind of mage, managing to take the natural world—already so animate—and breathe even more life into it. Invoking the tradition of Sufi poets like Hafiz, she writes as if walking hand in hand with the land, fingers threaded together, faces held close. In Strand’s intimate incantations, there is no separation between us and the earth: we are two bodies collapsing, devouring, and reforming one another. To read these poems, then, is to experience a kind of divine dissolution. What a blessing it is to find myself in the soft, electric forest of Strand’s language, and to fall in love with the world again.”—Nandi Rose of Half Waif
"Strand, like Dickinson, leads us in verse back to the original cathedral—the holiest, forgotten place, somewhere between earth and the dark matter of our own miraculous embodiment." —Meggan Watterson, The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Mary Magdalene Revealed
"Make Me Good Soil is a riotous refuge, a balm, and a beautiful undoing. Herons, rivers, one blue rose: living beings wander through Sophie Strand’s wondrous poems like mycelia, loosing the boundaries between self and earth. They carry us toward the truth of our own ecological becoming—toward flowering, fallowing, and the sweet, fertile possibility of becoming good soil ourselves." —Lyanda Haupt, author of Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit
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