“Eilbert offers an exquisite study bringing themes of nature and climate change to the forefront while also focusing on mental health, grief, trauma, and love. Throughout, she brilliantly tackles today’s crises, which she often presents hauntingly, aware that not everyone feels the same sense of urgency.”
“There is a quiet intensity to this book despite the siren-blaring urgency of what she describes in these pages. Eilbert’s verbs, in particular, keep me on the edge of my seat. ‘We see the moths // fried to the bottom of bulbs as a lesson in pleasure,’ she writes. . . . Throughout Overland, Eilbert provides an intimate and fierce look at the dread so many of us know all too well, its many precipitators, both internal and external, and illustrates just how tightly the inside and outside are bound.”
“Overland wagers it all on our imperfect language, our last best hope for airing experiences so private or suppressed as to feel incommunicable. . . . Language as gift, recognition, unconditional care: this is one of many discoveries Overland perches on, before its perpetually moving thought heads restlessly on.”
“In Eilbert’s third poetry collection, the opening and titular poem, ‘Overland,’ begins, ‘It isn’t useful to celebrate being alive. / But I’d like to be generous. . . .’ . . . Some sentences left me breathless . . . I see myself studying this book — full of wisdom — carefully, scribbling definitions in the margins and handwriting quotes in my notebook.”