Author: Amy Pence
Paperback: 91 pages, 2025
ISBN-13: 9781947175723

Amy Pence authored the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely (Main Street Rag, 2010), Armor, Amour (Ninebark Press, 2012) as well as the chapbooks Skin’s Dark Night (2River Press, 2003) and Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection (dancing girl press, 2019). Her hybrid book, [It] Incandescent (Ninebark, 2018)— with Emily Dickinson at its speculative center— won the Eyelands International Poetry Award in Greece. She’s also published short fiction, interviews, and essays in a variety of journals and magazines, including WHR, WSQ, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Poets & Writers. Red Hen Press will publish her debut novel, Yellow, in 2026. 

In the aftermath of personal disaster-a storm-felled tree that cleaved a house and a life in two-Amy Pence writes, “It was good to fill the sinkhole myself.” Both metaphor and fact, the “storied canopies” of the fallen tree and the gap left in its place provide an opening to probe past losses, beauties, and griefs. We Travel Towards It moves deftly between the personal and the public, from the cleaving of childbirth to the anonymous intimacies of strangers sharing hotels after the ever-intensifying natural disasters on the planet we all call home. Surprising and urgent in the face of climate catastrophe, this is a remarkable collection.

-Chelsea Rathburn, Author of Still Life with Mother and Knife and Poet Laureate of Georgia

Beginning from “the instant…the oak fell,” destroying the poet-speaker’s house on top of her, We Travel Towards It embarks on an awakening born of ruin at once personal and collective-the tree’s fall a consequence of climate change-intensified storms. Pence digs into memory, uprooting personal as well as societal traumas of gendered and environmental violence born of desire’s “endless pursuit, grasping at what / was never ours.” In these unsettling, empowering poems, Pence insists on the necessity of remembering not only “inviolable wonder” but “what is frail / what is brutal / what pearls under the feet.” Truth-seeking and transformative, the poems of We Travel Towards It are as gorgeous as they are devastating.

-Sandra Meek, Author of Still and Ecology of Elsewhere