Human Nature

The poems in Human Nature offer a stunning and tender ecology. It’s impossible to turn away from the awe and beauty, even as the poems also engage in playfulness and grief and resistance. In these deeply spiritual poems, the body is intricately bound to the natural world. As readers of this work, we can feel both the immense power and smallness of our human hands trembling in each shimmering line.

—Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography


Embodying a rainbow of emotions, the poetry of Paschold grounds the reader to the world around them and those that inhabit it, big and small.

—Joel Sartore Photography - Office Staff


Julie Paschold takes a bold swing right in the title of her collection Human Nature, the delineation of which has been the prime ambition of literary folks since the first someone put pen to paper. Even, or especially, when “[w]e thin-skinned hairless beings” look outside ourselves at spiders and crocodile icefish, we also hold up a mirror in order to study our own reflection. Who can’t at times identify with “a prairie vole, / popcorn of the prairie, / . . . everything is out to eat me”? And it’s not just our fellow critters we see ourselves in: Even “[t]he sky has a sliver caught in her thumb.” It's this commonality which drives the poems and helps us understand where and how we fit in.

—JV Brummels, author of All the Live-Long Day