A tender poetry collection considering home, family, and personal and ecological loss.   Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: “Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells.” Duncan’s poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change.   Interwoven into this thread is the narrator’s miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief. Given was the winner of 2022 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.   ". . . a book of such beauty and emotional power."  —Adroit Journal ". . .a poignant elegy and a sustained meditation integrating reflections on aesthetic perception and the complex interdependence between nature and psyche with deepening mourning of tragedies personal and collective."  —North of Oxford "I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a poet do what Liza Katz Duncan does here, testifying to loss and endurance this way, in such a radiant braid."  —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell " Given is the record of a haunting, a clear-eyed love song to the notion of home, a frame stilled on the highwater mark after the flood. Through finely wrought lyric poems that swell and break with movement, Liza Katz Duncan articulates the speaker’s longing for family and place 'despite the dying world.' . . . Given argues, granularly, tenderly, that home and place are worth remembering, worth returning to, that roots, however ephemeral, can ground us in the swirling tides of grief."  —Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations " Given by Liza Katz Duncan is one of the strongest debuts I’ve read in a long time. In an age where market and media forces encourage us to silo our griefs, Given makes the necessary argument that our losses intersect and inform one another: from the loss of a child to the loss of a home, a town, a shoreline, a way of living. The poems are emotionally moving and impressive in formal range, from short lyrics to longer sectioned sequences, incantatory litanies to poems in received forms. In Given , Duncan brings home the lived ramifications of dailiness in an age of ecological peril. The book is a necessary addition to our developing libraries of eco-poetry and docu-poetry and poetry period— Given is a must-read." —Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are Liza Katz Duncan is the author of Given (Autumn House Press 2023), which won the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Award. Her poems have appeared in  AGNI ,  About Place ,  Poem-a-Day ,  Poetry Northwest ,  National Poetry Review , and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from Poets & Writers , the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the Tucson Festival of Books. Liza grew up in New Jersey and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She teaches English as a Second Language in New Jersey public schools.