NOCTUARY by C. Rees

In this haunting debut, C. Rees immerses us in a landscape of personal and collective loss, where grief is not a process with beginning and end, but a churning ecology we inhabit. NOCTUARY bears witness to its rivers, trees, and lichens, as well as the contamination and exploitation of a rural county where gods “bleed settler dreams into the water-/shed” and “headstones grow like parasitoid wasps,” never looking away from our own complicity in “history’s cruel regard.” In the violence of these necropastoral nocturnes, the ruin wrought upon this land and the peoples who, living or dead, continue to inhabit it is unburied, as present as “foxes bruised with exhaust.” 

Through a divinatory poetics, wielding formal trickery, bounding echoes, and polyvocality, these poems unsettle inherited puritanical reasoning, favoring only what can be seen with the nightside eye. A queer necromancy,  poems as invocations calling back the dead in a voice that is not the “I” of everyday life, but one that is dispersed, refusing a singularity of self. In the oracular spaces conjured by Rees’s thrilling “ecto-poetics,” a family’s communal grief teems.

“Just as you stop considering loss, the losing presses its remainder,” Rees writes, and the poems drown in a flood of memory, mishearings, and shards of family stories. Where memory and story fail, these poems make a ritual of attention, attuning to the charged drift of what moves between lifetimes, transforming occlusions into generative sites of inquiry and encounter. Not in a search for what is factual, but what is fractured, burgeoning and shared, where “time [binds] us like onion grass.” This book invites us to risk a brush with what is possible, to lower into its lyrical floodplain of lamentation, where we may be bound in a complex keening that, like foxgloves, grows from scattered ash.

* Signed pre-orders will ship by September 15th, 2025 *

The oracle as poet has never been more welcome! I was hooked from the opening poem of this extraordinary book by C. Rees. It is all set, waiting for you, “ever the devotee, our house prostrates in the dirt / as dawn falls upon us like a forgotten sentence.” — CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

A noctuary is an account of the night. In their collective elegy of this name, C. Rees recounts for us a span of time haunted by an autumnal violence on the verge of winter: the violence of hunting season, of sudden death by water and fire, of cruelties exercised in person, of recurring losses across generations. Yet within this dystopian exurban landscape, as dark as any from George Crabbe or David Lynch in their own time, the natural world persists. And so does “the glory of boys” who with their fierce energy “[race] the graveyard on their bikes.”    
     — Susan Stewart, author of Bramble

C. Rees’s NOCTUARY is a book of the night, and it is the rare first book that poem after poem finds the speaker perennially enmeshed in a “we.” Here is an exploration of self that cannot escape family, place, or history, the misbegotten origins that identify and entrap us. And yet, the “I” that struggles to emerge out of the “we” is not unlike the reader of NOCTUARY, seeking light and connection and, thus, inevitably, arriving at metamorphosis. While all may be grief, all becomes possible in this book. Rees is an utterly original poet, who has somehow fused mid-Atlantic Gothic with Greek tragedy to write of our collective and environmental sicknesses with emotional precision and unexpected compassion. — Jennifer Chang, author of An Authentic Life 

C. Rees (they/them) is a nonbinary poet, educator, and bookseller. They were raised in Pennsylvania (Lënapehòkink) and currently live on Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Jumanos, Lipan Apache, Sana, and Tonkawa land, what is now Austin, TX. C. holds an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

✦ Select Online Publications ✦

✦ Apocalypse Confidential: CLOAK & DAGGER. ON FORTUNO OMBRA

✦ Poetry Society of America, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, “Crossing”

✦ Territory, Issue 13, excerpts from “Bomb Pulse”

✦ Bellingham Review, “Pansy”

✦ Frontier Poetry: OPEN Finalist. “un-animal”

✦ Action Books Blog, “Four M U T A T I O N S”

110 pages
ISBN 979-8-9905483-8-1
LCCN 2026938508 
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