Jacqueline Balderrama

Nectar and Small Jacqueline Balderrama

In Nectar and Small, Jacqueline Balderrama offers entry into the small nature of backyards and storm drains, bird encounters and beach toys swept away. She examines the quiet presence of shared inhabitants, presence too of encroaching waste. These free verse poems celebrate the discovery of nature's detail and interconnectedness. This is especially true for the series of bird poems woven throughout the collection where species glimpsed in the grasslands of Centennial Valley, Montana defy boundary with disappearance or vast migration. In tandem, Nectar and Small addresses moral dilemmas by confronting individual consumerism and admitting domestic struggles to reduce. Balderrama points to our capacity to appreciate the world around us instead of fear or dismissal, a careful attentiveness toward what so many, human and nonhuman, name home.