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Poet Jim Powell’s first collection in twenty years examines
the indigenous habitat of Northern California,
treating history as a kind of sediment. Powell, fascinated by the first person,
turns to eyewitness historical accounts and primary witnesses to create a
portrait assembled of samples from twenty-five ‘strata’ in the ‘substrate’ of
the region.

Largely narrative, Powell’s poems embrace the tradition,
borrowing tools from prose and contemporary oral narration. His title poem
summons twenty-five witnesses from oral and documentary history, ethnology,
archeology, ethnobotany and linguistics, all providing a composite cultural
history of California.  Substrate
is a vivid, multifaceted volume dazzling in its lush imagery and its linguistic
richness.

Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made the
World and the translator of The Poetry of Sappho and Catullan Revenants.
He received a CCLM Younger Poets Prize in 1986 and a MacArthur Fellowship
(1993-1198), and was the Sherry Poet and Lecturer at the University of Chicago
in 2005. He is a fourth generation California
native and lifelong resident of the Bay Area.

See
David Ulin’s Los Angeles Times’ review.