In No Lunch Among the Day Stars, Jeanine Stevens is working at the height of her poetic gifts. Her background in anthropology, her flair for history and love of travel, and her sense of what is puzzling about the lived-in world, all her experiences generate remarkable poems. Many lines reverberate in the memory, transcendently or simply worded. We accompany the poet through her wanderings or trace her presence through emanations. Certain poems haunt the reader; "Coffin Ship" evokes the escape from Ireland’s Potato Famine, starvation, plague and contagion shroud the verse: "And, hearts remembering the great hunger…still watch rickety ships…leave the Poet of Derry…sealed in Atlantic’s whitest foam." These virtuoso poems, somber and upbeat, transmit a different contagion, the energy in composing. Stevens’ haul of insights and scents, flavors and travels, is a gift to relish.

In No Lunch Among the Day Stars, we see the synergy of the poet’s capacious intellect – engaged with art, science, history, literature, the climate crisis, and the cosmos – with her close observation of the natural world, culture, and human nature. The poems pay homage to masters of poetry and art (Ashbery, Frost, Picasso, Warhol, Van Gogh), to the hand irons on a grandmother’s woodstove, to the fragile existence of an 18th century Leni-Lenape woman, and, always, to endangered nature. Stevens’ eloquently expressed melancholy and yearning are always infused with reminders of renewal and resilience, for example, the survival of the tough-rooted violet in the face of wildfire’s destruction. These poems articulate, lovingly and precisely, the beauty that is present even as we witness endings: "the tint of a lover’s thigh, deep inside, where flesh begins to emit the fragrance of wild mushrooms," or, in this address to the Monterey Cypress, "In old age, your body... / bends inland, your trunk swivels— / magnificent bonsai... / In the scent of drying kelp, / time to watch new lambs..." Stevens’ new collection nourishes and satisfies.