Reading Unfruitful is like entering, “a field with its arms open,” a field that, like the body, is what remains when memory and language no longer help us prevent our losses, but become the “container of hope” that helps us survive them. Exploring Doxey’s poem-scape is like gazing into a starry night, or the view unfurling from a mountaintop. It is an encounter with the ecologically rooted imagination and its limitless, life-giving terrain. Like any place I love to wander, these are poems that I will revisit again and again. —Kyce Bello , author of Refugia and Far Country Joanna Doxey’s Unfruitful reads as a daybook or journal, a private note-taking of our common 21st century condition when we find ourselves, as she finds herself, “on the edge of so many precipices.” Cast in a winter gone missing, Doxey returns poetry to one of its oldest tasks—to help us dwell more decently on earth: “We do what we can / to create a home.” Doubt may simply be faith’s holding pattern—or so these poems help me believe. “I am a false prayer,” she writes, but a prayer nonetheless. For here, even despair is a call out to the world, and as with any true call, the hope is to listen for an answer—to listen as the sky itself listens, just a whisper, for the secret of its name, the word for blue. —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Elements & Offerings Early in Joanna Doxey’s UNFRUITFUL, she takes us to a new sub-development near the Colorado border with Wyoming, marked as much by its new, unpeopled houses lit up at night, "empty beacons," as it is by the absence of the cries of the coyotes who used to pass through the field in the evenings while Doxey and her partner walked their dog. In presence there is an absence and these poems live the experiment, the experience, of finding that the reverse must also be true. The years of UNFRUITFUL are marked by the ecological absences of precipitation and other people, of drought and pandemic, and the personal ecological grief of infertility, the “organ ecotone” of the ovaries, the seasonal cycles of hope and the single, singular absence of the hoped-for. “Fruit begins with emptied follicles,” Doxey writes — what is emptied here in UNFRUITFUL fills with grief made literal, in tooth, lung, and heart — and fills also ice and wind, field and valley, coyote and owl, “all this time now, all this sky,” It begins and ends full with the long slow love of marriage, the love that rhymes with “lung” — with the constancy of one’s own name, one’s own heartbeat. —Katie Naughton , author of The Real Ethereal About the Author: Joanna Doxey is the author the book of poetry, Plainspeak, WY (Platypus Press, 2016) as well as several poems appearing in CutBank Literary Journal , Denver Quarterly , Ghost Proposal , Tinderbox , and others. She currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with her human and nonhuman family, where she teaches ecopoetry, creative writing, and interdisciplinary liberal arts at Colorado State University.