Book Description
Fossil Sky is a creation of remarkable originality and beauty. An epic poem in the form of a lyrical map, the text arcs and twists through space without beginning or end. Composed on a single 54-square-inch sheet, it liberates poetry from the conventions of page and book, and thus expands the mental space in which a poem can operate. Written by a renowned translator of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy during a period of time he spent in southern France, Fossil Sky distills a year of walks taken near the poet’s home, tracing the paths a mind takes through landscape, history and ideation.
Hinton has re-defined the boundaries of poetry in print which is something very exciting, indeed. Fossil Sky folds out like a map. And I'm not speaking in simile; this is literal. It can be spread across a tabletop, a floor, your lap in the car. I am stunned by the thing as an object. Is this where readers of contemporary poetry should be looking to set their fingers to pulse?
— Olivia Cronk, Bookslut
Fossil Sky describes a landscape: the south of France . . . it's a portrait we receive in fragments—a tatter of sky here, of water there, with images of bright summer fields blurring into ones of frost.
— Seven Days
[T]he layering of these drawn-out stanzas, within the poem’s blue horizon . . . create something like a simultaneous network, rather than linear “message,” initiates an entirely different experience for the reader.
— Jonathan Skinner, Ecopoetics
