A poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.”

The prose poetry in Kevin Phan’s first collection, Dears, Beloveds, offers a fine-grained meditation on grief—personal, familial, ecological, and political. Informed by the author’s engagement with Buddhism & mindfulness, the poems address looming absences: in our vanishing earth, the scraps of a haunting voicemail, or waiting at hospice with little to do.

The Minuses beckons attention to ecological and feminist issues, amplifying the endangerments predicating women’s lives and the natural world, laying bare the struggle and faith necessary to endure with integrity and spirit intact.