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Julia Wendell’s The Art of Falling is a collection that explores the complexities, mechanics, and interconnectedness of relationships in the human, animal, and natural worlds. These nuanced, beautifully wrought poems consider family expansively and with tender nostalgia, even as they unearth past trauma, and they are guided by a speaker whose hard-earned wisdom comes from experience and endurance: “Come off a horse enough times / and you’ll learn how to fall.” Indeed, knowing how to fall allows Wendell’s open-eyed work to acknowledge pain but not be weighed down by it, moving instead to consider what blossoms and grows each passing season. Love here is represented by and extended to plants and animals—reluctant gladiolas, bursting peonies, a menagerie of dogs and birds—but nothing so beloved as horses, an anchoring and comforting presence throughout. With its crescendos and diminuendos, this book is concerned not just with falling but also art and its making, paying homage to persistence and survival through music and musicians, paintings and painters, books and their characters. These buoying presences don’t distract from the inevitable march of time toward death and decay but reassure us that time also brings healing and perspective. The Art of Falling offers an enduring wisdom and reminds us that “Sometimes you just have to let things toughen.”

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