In Scorch, Natalie Rice situates our sense of individual disconnection and grief within a larger ecology of loss, where nature is an active force and change is a continuous, complex cycle encompassing both the wildfire and whatever beauty may still rise out of the scorched ground. Grappling with connection and disconnection, plenitude and emptiness, Rice’s poems “lean/into what cannot be explained,” listening for the music, voicing the contradictions—“how the unsayable/hung like a red berry nin the back/of my throat.”