What the Earth Renews: New and Selected Poems

In What the Earth Renews, Spencer Sheehan-Kalina gathers a vital selection of earlier work alongside a striking suite of new poems, tracing a poetics shaped by return, resilience, and quiet transformation. This collection listens closely to cycles—of grief and regrowth, of leaving and coming back, of the self as something continually remade.

Rooted in the textures of land and body, these poems move through coastal rain, moss-covered memory, and the fragile architectures of love and identity. Sheehan-Kalina writes from within a queer, attentive gaze, where tenderness becomes a way of surviving—and of reimagining what it means to belong.

The “selected” poems reveal the deepening arc of a voice attuned to both vulnerability and endurance, while the “new” work presses further into renewal, asking what can be reclaimed after loss, and what might still grow in altered ground.

Luminous and searching, What the Earth Renews is a collection that understands healing not as a return to what was, but as a careful making of what comes next.