As John Ashbery once avowed, and prophetically, "we are fabulous beasts after all."  In American Massif , Nicholas Regiacorte takes the full measure of that prophecy by setting it into vivid motion across the American earth. Along the way, we are dearly reminded that the ordinary light of our common day is ravishing, that the familiar nets of our common language sparkle, as after a morning rain. While there is pain here, and outrage, a fabulous delight persists. This is a heartening, brilliant collection.

— Donald Revell, author of White Campion.

“At first it may seem too ‘on the nose’ to speak of our perilous shifting climate through the voice of a mastodon, ‘the elephant in the room’ as it were. But Regiacorte’s exquisite, lush lines swept my doubt away. For there is abundant humanity at the heart of this book. ‘In the heart of my woods I will open for you alone a bright circle of grasses...’ In all the ways that poetry can sway us with its art, this collection does deeply move me. ‘Spearing to the core.’ Thankfully an elephant never forgets.”

— D. A. Powell, author of Repast

…This is a daring book of Whitmanesque measure, that explores personal and collective histories from vantages as varied as the mastodon and the father whose child is growing up faster than he can track. It will keep you rereading and discovering more each time. Regiacorte is that rarest of writers whose work refuses to privilege the separation of “I” from “you”; this I is “we,” all of us, every living creature, in all of our fears and curiosity, violence and vulnerability.

— Vievee Francis, author of Forest Primeval

Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif is a stunning book with an extraordinary reach. Bearing lyrical witness to the grit particulars of embodiment and extinction, Regiacorte examines with a keen intimacy both the wild and the domestic, weaving a thread from the present moment back to bygone epochs… In these highly pressurized poems, Regiacorte manages to halt traffic at the intersection of time and nature, personal and animal, emergence and extinction. This is a fantastic book of poetry!

— Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave