Tana Jean Welch with Ryler Dustin, In Parachutes Descending

In Parachutes Descending follows the speaker's decision to leave her Bostonian husband for Jane, a San Franciscan artist, while charting the sensual consequences of our bodily entanglements. These poems capture personal desires fermenting among current earthly cataclysms, including climate change and global capitalism. In doing so, this collection asks us to think inclusively about the ways all of us are intimately entwined with others.

Tana Jean Welch is the author of the poetry collections In Parachutes Descending (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) and Latest Volcano (Marsh Hawk Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, and in journals including The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she currently lives in Tallahassee where she is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

Ryler Dustin is the author of Trailer Park Psalms, published in 2023 as winner of the University of Pittsburgh Press's Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Heavy Lead Birdsong, published with Write Bloody in 2010. He has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam and holds graduate writing degrees from the University of Houston and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After living in Spain, Michigan, Jack Kerouac's former home, and a cabin in the Oregon wilderness, he recently returned to his hometown of Bellingham, Washington. You can find his work in places like Verse Daily, The Best of Iron Horse, Major Jackson's The Slowdown, and rylerdustin.com.