Things as It Is | The World It Was

Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death. These are the demands Chase Twichell has made of her poems for over half a century. One of America’s most prominent poets and a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell seeks to perceive what Shunryu Suzuki called things-as-it-is. These two books, published here in tandem, confront fundamental questions about the nature of the self: childhood trauma, the fate of a damaged planet, marriage and widowhood. Twichell’s poems – spare, unflinching, and exact – are distillations of reverence and grief. With language at once precise and intimate, she compels us to consider what it means to be conscious in a world where beauty and joy endure amid ecological and political crises. Chase Twichell has published nine books of poetry, including Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2010. Things as It Is followed from Copper Canyon Press in the US in 2018, and that collection is now published here for her UK readers together with her latest collection, The World It Was (2026).