Nathaniel Tarn s newest collection of poems, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, dives deep into the spiritual and physical sufferings of our global age. After a moving overture, the book unfolds in five sections: Of the Perfected Angels, with its lucid meditation on Issenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald; Dying Trees, written out of the horrible loss of hundreds of thousands of trees throughout the American West in recent years; War Stills, an engagement with the ongoing atrocities in Iraq; Movement / North of the Java Sea, taking flight from Maui to Bali to Papua New Guinea; and the final section Sarawak, snaking its way through the river and indigenous anguish of Borneo, where Tarn as poet-anthropologist surveyed the loss of forest lands and its effects on tribal peoples.
