To Start An Orchard by Michael Hettich

The title poem starts with some unknown kind of fruit sitting on the window sill. It sprouts a leaf and engenders contemplation on what it would be like as a tree in the yard. These poems are accessible and wide-ranging in subject matter. These three blurbs affirm how eclectic this poetry is: “Michael Hettich has written, with extraordinary empathy, a book about vanishment: of dreams and fathers, of love and animals and birds. Look carefully at the glinting lights he paints. Like everything beautiful, they will be gone before you know it.” —Lola Haskins. “In these stunning, fable-like poems, humans turn into animals in transformations that seem utterly natural, if not necessary. There’s a merging with wildness, even as wildness is disappearing. The poems themselves seem almost to disappear rather than end, as if they are heading into some trees, or entering the body of a horse. Hettich, though up against implied extinctions, keeps the reader entranced in a world we thought had vanished