UPDATE
The limited edition of Rebecca Weil’s new chapbook has sold out. Monday Editions will issue a second (open) edition in short order. Put yourself on the waiting list here.
MONDAY EDITIONS is pleased to announce the publication of Rebecca Weil’s new chapbook, Shadow of a Bear: A Poem in 23 Passages.
As the subtitle indicates, this chapbook consists of a single poem divided into twenty-three parts that range in length from a single line (“I give room to any mother with young”) to longer meditations on perception (“Sometimes we look for things we want to see. / Sometimes we look again, another way”), on the mysteries elided by self-identity (“it is hard enough to know what it is to be ourselves / and so easy to forget that we can’t know // what it is to be another living being”), and on the toll that human life can take on the lives of the black bears in the poet’s rural community (“Gun talk is loose / when charcoal grills are broken”).
I see Rebecca Weil finding ways, while observing the wild world, to learn from its rhythms—gluttony, longing, rest. She has a way of writing little blessings for moments of insight that settle the mind. Weil reminds me that a poem, like an episode of direct encounter with Earth creatures, can offer discovery, connection, immersion, as if leaves and wings and roots and all the rest are teaching us how to be human here, and Weil is the courier of this instruction.
—Kim Stafford, author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt, Singer Come from Afar, and As the Sky Begins to Change
Weil moves deftly from imagistic lyric to narrative, from persona discourse to philosophical reflection to neighborly reportage (“Jerry says the bear has eaten / corn behind his cow barn, / left broken stalks like crop circles”), from family anecdote (“halfway up the stairs on our wedding night / the innkeeper charged us with his bear gun”) to the direst of interspecies encounters:
inside muscular skin inside rocketing metal did they see each other know who the other was a flash of eyes before each other became a headline
Rebecca Weil writes with hope: “we can make space / for the wild around us / and inside us.” The speaker in this kaleidoscopic poem questions what it means to see the “other”—in this case, Ursus americanus—for what the “other” truly is while showing us how the maternal may help bridge the divide. Weil’s language—at moments spare, at other times lush and luxurious—enthralls, serving as a wise and insistent guide to the possibilities of crossing boundaries and of learning, with deep compassion and empathy, to live peacefully in the presence of the world that sustains us.
—Todd Davis, author of Native Species, Coffin Honey, and Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems
This is deceptively quiet work. It layers daily observation of seasonal changes with (as Weil writes in “A Tumble of Wild,” her brief introductory essay) “impossible beauty and searing tragedy,” all in a voice that resists anthropomorphism while embodying the most profound humane values.
Rebecca Weil, Shadow of a Bear: A Poem in 23 Passages (Monday Editions, 2025). Limited edition of 50 copies, signed and numbered; 40 pages, with an introductory essay by the author. Cover illustration by Kristen Griger. ISBN: 979-8-9926804-3-0. Publication date: October 29, 2025. Price: $15. UPDATE: The limited edition has sold out. Put yourself on the waiting list for the second (open) edition here. All proceeds from both editions support the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of orphaned, abandoned, and injured black bear cubs by the Kilham Bear Center, Lyme, New Hampshire.
Rebecca Weil writes from the edge of a heron rookery surrounded by swamps, forests, and farmland. Her recent writing has been published in One, Emerge Literary Journal, Earthshine, Humana Obscura, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, the Journal of Wild Culture, and Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, where her piece “Old Friends” was a finalist in the journal’s 2024 nonfiction contest. Weil has work forthcoming in Pangyrus and is the author of Bring Me the Ocean: Nature as Teacher, Messenger, and Intermediary, an award-winning collection of true stories about connecting individuals and communities with nature. More of her writing can be found at www.rebeccaweil.com.
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I don't know how I missed the first printing, but I'm on the list for the second!