Tributaries

Tributaries is a pulse, a heartbeat of imprinted memories found within the land we all find ourselves in. Listen closely to the language of tree bark, owl howls, bison, coyotes, butterfly dreams. An eco-poetic journey that digs into the humanity and spirituality of nature and the one who travels its paths. As Everett writes, "My body is a land of limestone/karstic, hollow, just as malleable,/a living structure where the dead/carve their initials."
-Aimee Herman, author of Meant to Wake Up Feeling and To Go Without Blinking

This collectionis brimming with sonically-charged poems that engage water and beyond-human beings on an elemental level, while also being attuned to the way that man-made history and our own misdeeds haunts the landscapes around us.
-Sage Marshall, author ofEcholocations

Tributaries is as meditative as it is demanding. The collection utilizes both linguistics and novel vocabulary to pull the reader on a journey of ecopoetics and despite everything an undercurrent of hope.
-Joshua Robinson, editor of Screaming at America: An Anthology of Dissent, and author of This Way to Exit,
Millennialism & New Poems, and Homeless with God.

This book is an evocative sip of American heartland heartbreak. Aspen Everette writes with a ghost-like precision, his questions a haunting; inviting each of us to journey with him to a place where we are all lost and thus- where we can truly be present, because our preconceived ideas are fragments on the wind.
-Elizabeth Woods-Darby, author of the upcoming Bones We Made Together

The poems read like a kind of embodied prayer that comes from a place of deep connection with the more-than-human-world with language that at times feels incantatory with a mythic quality.
-Anna Citrino, author ofA Space Between

Everett writes with a sure hand and a deep heart and you can feel it all the way through this collection, asking us in, like striking matches in the dark - Will your soul need Britta filtration? What is the color of laughter? - This chapbook is full of beautiful beasts of poetry, ones that knock the wind right out of you, and then somehow give it back. The way all great poetry should.
-Elizabeth Woods-Darby, author of the forthcoming Bones We Made Together

The poems in Everett'sTributariestouch the vulnerable space of unknowing we currently live in with its grief and beauty found in equal measure.
-Anna Citrino, author ofA Space Between

In the words of our Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, "it hurts to become"; this collection pushes through the pain of the anthropocene becoming something more alive, revealing limbs reaching for a better world. The poems in this collection are never so binary to choose to be a meditation on climate grief or to choose to elevate the natural world. They are a both/and, a queering, an honesty. There is a beautiful disobedience that Everett encourages us to join him for, where we too "ignore the no trespassing warnings", "follow the river" and lose our way.
-Brice Maiurro, author of The Heart is an Undertaker Bee


Aspen Everett is a poet and creative from the wind-tossed flatlands of Southeast Kansas. Writing what they call Heathen Mythology, Aspen aims to rewrite the cultural myths of dominion and return readers to reverence for the More-than-Human. Following fetid rivers upstream until the waters ran clean, they find themselves in Boulder Colorado, beneath the shadow of Mt. Arapaho. Tributaries is their first book.