Jim Krosschell
Jim Krosschell has published poems and essays in some 85 journals, plus two essay collections: One Man’s Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Deer Isle, ME and Newton, MA, and volunteers on Boards for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.
Man Afield
Man Afield is a lyrical journey through the living world, guided by a backyard naturalist attuned to both wonder and warning. These poems chronicle spiritual and physical excursions into landscapes larger than any one mind or body — places where awe, joy, disorientation, and reckoning intertwine.
Organized in six evocative sections, the collection:
I. bears witness from a seaside deck;
II. wanders through yard and neighboring woods;
III. explores the shifting shoreline;
IV. imagines the vast and restless ocean;
V. surveys the scars of environmental damage;
VI. honors home in its many meanings.
Throughout, the poems dwell in the charged space where humans and the natural world meet. They examine our peculiar paradox: we are the only species that knowingly fouls its own nest — and the only one capable of choosing restraint. With clear-eyed honesty, Man Afield mourns the grinding erosion of precious places while celebrating the stubborn beauty that persists despite us — and sometimes because of us.
From deck to forest trail, from tidal pull to smoke-streaked sky, these poems trace one person’s evolving relationship with plants, animals, weather, memory, and spirit. Intimate yet expansive, they invite readers to travel outward into the wild and inward toward belonging.
Man Afield is at once a field journal, a meditation, and a love song — to earth, to home, and to the fragile bond between them.