American Massif follows the first stages of one American Mastodon in his attempts to evolve. His life begins to resemble a human life. His mother appears human. His wife and children, human. His own birthplace and childhood. His appetites, sins, faith, cynicism, big plans. All apparently human. At the same time, all of these things are relinquished or increasingly subject to the story of his own extinction. The massif’s landscapes are as varied as pinewoods, clay hills and prairie, but grow more abstract. In his naive way, A.M. moves through or ponders the Higgs Field, art, national and family states of emergency. From his own house to an airport, from volcano to museum, he goes foraging for images good enough to eat, for friends, for antidotes to apocalypse. Perhaps no more human by the end, A.M. still bears his “girth and melancholy,” though having shed some of the illusions, like vestiges, with which he started. Dazed as much as sobered, he feels himself released into the world like a new habitat―however threatened. Rather, like the Pompeian who returns to her city, the Mastodon comes into his own. “As John Ashbery once avowed, and prophetically, ‘we are fabulous beasts after all.’ In American Massif, Nicholas Regiacorte takes the full measure of that prophecy by setting it into vivid motion across the American earth. Along the way, we are dearly reminded that the ordinary light of our common day is ravishing, that the familiar nets of our common language sparkle, as after a morning rain. While there is pain here, and outrage, a fabulous delight persists. This is a heartening, brilliant collection.” --Donald Revell, author of White Campion “At first it may seem too ‘on the nose’ to speak of our perilous shifting climate through the voice of a mastodon, ‘the elephant in the room’ as it were. But Regiacorte’s exquisite, lush lines swept my doubt away. For there is abundant humanity at the heart of this book. ‘In the heart of my woods I will open for you alone a bright circle of grasses...’ In all the ways that poetry can sway us with its art, this collection does deeply move me. ‘Spearing to the core.’ Thankfully an elephant never forgets.” --D.A. Powell, author of Repast “Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif is a stunning book with an extraordinary reach. Bearing lyrical witness to the grit particulars of embodiment and extinction, Regiacorte examines with a keen intimacy both the wild and the domestic, weaving a thread from the present moment back to bygone epochs. With a vivid style, American Massif features a highly original, urgent kind of concentration: ‘In the heart of my woods / I will open / for you alone a bright circle of / grasses whose / entrance will be guarded by a / seeping maple / and marked by the unearthed cheekbone of /a boulder…’ In these highly pressurized poems, Regiacorte manages to halt traffic at the intersection of time and nature, personal and animal, emergence and extinction. This is a fantastic book of poetry!” --Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave Nicholas Regiacorte was born and raised in southern Maine. Since that time, he's lived in Florida, gone to college in Virginia, worked on roofing crews, worked in a deli, and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He's had the good fortune to live in Italy, once on a Fulbright year in Campania, the second time as a Visiting Professor in Florence. His poems have appeared in 14 Hills , Copper Nickel , New American Writing , Descant , Bennington Review , and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, where he lives with wife and two little boys.