Idra Novey's first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey's spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda.

"In Idra Novey's Soon and Wholly, the language of fables, with their strangeness, timelessness, and sense of foreboding, meets the world we live in right now—a world on fire, a world fracked and broken, a world in which we 'snack on data' and 'sip conditioned air.' And like fables, these poems are part cautionary tale, part imaginative alchemy, and wholly brilliant. I don't know how Novey does it—'This blue work. /This gluing of impossibilities.'—but I'll read this book again and again, eager to learn."
—Maggie Smith

"With Soon and Wholly, Idra Novey turns the familiar inside out and dwells in the strangeness of the world. Bearing the spoils from her travails as translator and novelist, she returns to her native genre of poetry to regale us with wit, wisdom and an open heart tempered by the itinerant work of her imagination. This collection is more home than homecoming. From one poem to the next, she's off again, sweeping us in the updraft of her flight, taking our breath away."
—Gregory Pardlo