“Otolith challenges the idea that madness is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. With metaphors and imagery as wild as the ecologies she encounters, Emily Nilsen shows that repeating the same question can yield multiple answers: Otolith’s world is not static, won’t hold still for its photograph, doesn’t sit pretty. And this is its virtue.”
“Otolith is a house built by gravity and movement, at once weighty and ephemeral. These poems are fogged in and present, placed and displaced. Nilsen is a poet of the interstitial, of longing, of the sensitive shift itself.”
“Spend enough time at a remote research station, suggests Emily Nilsen, and you, too, will identify fifty different species of fog. In Otolith, Nilsen’s poems measure all that environmental science cannot: the alignment of a tree planter’s sensibility to charred forest, the geolocation of grief. Wake before dawn and follow Nilsen’s ‘solitary, rugged route’ into our fragile ecology.”
“… the poems evoke bush fever and sparks of eerie disquiet, the violence of human disturbance and greed, the rapacious, patriarchal and colonial underpinnings and repercussions of the forest industry.”
– Herizons