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Cynthia Neely writes stunningly of loss: the amplification of empty houses, the diminishment of metaphorical appetites, and most movingly-in “A Confession of Twenty-One Parts”-to her unborn. “Even when it’s gone it lingers. / Even a body of water / skimmed with ice / still breathes.” These poems with their twining of the Cascadia environment and the poet’s own life are a gift. Neely has arrived at the important questions in her work: “Is this how the beginning ends?-A slow kiss / to another’s sigh?” There’s only one way to find out.

–Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas

Compelling, elegant, and linguistically dynamic, I’ll Dress Myself in Wilderness and You is filled with poems that perfectly balance emotion and intellect, painting intimate portraits of identity, loss, and nature. Neely showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details with authenticity and layered meanings. Each poem maps out the human heart in relation to that larger earth heart in all their internal conflicts with precision and grace. With vivid and accessible language, I’ll Dress Myself in Wilderness and You reminds us of the beautiful complexities of being human.

–John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another

I admire how these lyric poems take us so compellingly into the wilderness of bird and branch, boulder and snowfall, even as they take us into the wildness of the human heart. There is grief, a down-to-the-bone keening, and, in counterpoint, like music, love. The real thing. The baffling, messy, paradoxical, thin stubble kind. And I love that about this collection.

–Derek Sheffield, co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry and poetry editor of Terrain.org

“Sorrowing I love best. It sings like a saw,” Cynthia Neely writes, considering the stages of grief. In spite of the personal tragedy at the core of I’ll Dress Myself in Wilderness and You, Neely’s newest collection overflows with profound reverence for all life-from people to pines and beetles to birds. In each poem she finds an original music to convey worry, self-doubt, loss, or enduring love, using a variety of forms that come together like one long ode to breath. A deeply honest, deeply moving, deeply beautiful book.

–Susan Cohen, author of Democracy of Fire

“It’s not the leaving that’s grieving me / it’s all the grieving I’ll have to leave behind,” writes Cynthia Neely in I’ll Dress Myself in Wilderness and You. Neely resolutely studies layers of grief: the loss of an unborn child, a world lost to climate change and fire, her son’s retreat into divergent choices. All this and more is chanted in delicate form and craft, in ghazals and subtle rhyme. Deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest, she continually finds wisdom in the living world-which, ultimately, becomes a mirror for our own suffering and survival. These poems find solace in connection with the land and with others but never deny the reality of longing.

–Dion O’Reilly, author of Sadness of the Apex Predator

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