Make Me Good Soil

For fans of Ada Limón and Kate Baer, Make Me Good Soil is a luminous, intimate new poetry collection from celebrated author Sophie Strand that explores personal love, loss, trauma healing, and illness through the lens of interspecies connection.

Sophie Strand's poetry is attuned to the too-often ignored truth that human beings are not self-contained, and are rather sustained by vast, living networks beyond their physical selves. Writing through this lens of attention, Strand traces the threads between language and the ecosystems that sustain it, opening poetry itself into a multi-voiced chorus.

Tender yet unflinching, immersive and visionary, Make Me Good Soil invites readers into this interspecies conversation. In an age of increasing isolation and decreasing access to nature, Strand reclaims poetry as a symbiotic exchange—one that nurtures collective connection, shared responsibility, and the possibility of flourishing. Make Me Good Soil is comprised of 115 poems both brand-new and already beloved by readers, with a foreword from Willow Defebaugh, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning climate and culture magazine Atmos.