This revised edition of Bioku’s direct, urgent, deeply personal poetry captures a lifelong quest for rootedness, connection, security, and love in a world that’s too often unjust and a body that can seem to betray the self. “They say work hard and play harder, but I’m not fond of games,” Bioku writes in “Grinds & Flows.” These 70 poems bear out that declaration, finding the poet forever focused on the essential and the elemental. The first half of Untethered Grounds explores the latter, with verses on water, fire, land, and air in four sections, and a poet reckoning with humanity’s place in the natural world: “Forest Moments” relishes “Loveliness undisturbed by human development,” while “Wingspan” funds both relief in time by the sea and prickling reminders of our failures of stewardship over nature. Musing on the plight of the albatross, Bioku notes “Plastic consumes their intestines; they struggle to feed their offspring.”

Bioku’s exploration of natural forces considers beauty, balance, and the cycles of life, but also wildness, including the fires of passion, and destruction, especially in pained evocations of California wildfires (“The hot springs around the corner have begun to boil”) and mudslides, in which homes are “swept away into the weeping ocean.” For Bioku, people can be as strong as the elements. Like her subjects, Bioku’s linework is blunt and forceful, but sweetened with playful parallel structures and bursts of hope, rooted in love.

The collection’s second half offers less conceptual consistency, but Bioku’s considerations of self-perception (“Distorted body image: I never know what or who to believe”), physical and mental health, prejudice and economic injustice, and surprise connections with strangers feel of a piece with the elemental material. While a tendency toward wordiness flattens some lines, this is the work of a poet eager to build something enduring in a hard world, someone who understands the power of love—of self, of others, even of those we must forgive.

Takeaway: Poems of elemental resilience, connection, and the power of love.

Comparable Titles: Yrsa Daley-Ward’s Bone, Clementine von Radics’s In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-