Tuning in to Wonder: A Review of NIGHT OWL by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Updated: 3 days ago
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Night Owl: Poems
Ecco: an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers / 2026 / 112 pp / $26.99
Reviewed by Emily Persichetti Schuster / October 2026
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest collection, Night Owl, showcases at least a dozen received forms, while also demonstrating a sharp attention to free verse. Equally stunning in its capacity for passion as its structural presentation, Night Owl’s four sections take the reader both literally and metaphorically through advancing nocturnal stages. Night Owl stays close to Nezhukumatathil’s demonstrated connection to the natural world, as seen in her previous four poetry collections, a chapbook co-authored with Ross Gay, and two illustrated essay collections. But this latest work from the multi award- and fellowship-winning writer reveals the darker sides of nature and humanity. Poems swing from intense anger and ecological grief to unbounded wonder and awe of both nature’s endurance and the speaker’s own capacity for love. Through this pendulum of emotional expression, joy is not diluted, but rather strengthened, by juxtaposition to grief. The reader will delight in both familiarity and discovery among these pages.
As Nezhukumatathil writes in her author’s note, Night Owl “gathers up a number of my favorite poetic forms to teach and write,” including abecedarian, ars poetica, carmina figurata, haibun, zuihitsu, and others. The formal range alone is both an impressive demonstration of Nezhukumatathil’s mastery of craft and an educational foray into modern applications of forms that are, in some cases, thousands of years old. This is clearly a poet who possesses an expansive toolbox for shaping free verse as well. Couplets support intimacy and trust in poems like “Bloodflower” and “The Immigrant’s Very Good Daughter,” emulating loving nostalgia for aging parents. “To See the Veins” is a narrow-margined prose poem with fixed stanza lengths, creating visual consistency that pleasantly mimics the poem’s garden plot borders. But this form also necessitates harsh and disconcerting enjambments, themselves embodying the poetic themes of safety and kindness.
Most eye-catching are the carmina figurata, or shape poems, featuring repeated and variably sized lines coalescing into shapes of a stalking cat (“Discovery in the Dark”) and a soaring bird (“My Son Reminds Me He Was Listening All Along.”) Also memorable are poems whose carefully calculated indentations, line lengths, and caesuras create visual impressions, as in “Arches National Park Sunset Haibun” and “Scorpion.” The poet’s technical deftness provides fresh alternatives to traditionally lineated poetry, inviting readers to linger on the words, questioning what might emerge from repetition and from absence.
Most visually stunning is “Big Night,” an outward spiraling poem that forces the reader to turn the book sideways and upside down again, and again, and again, following the text’s orientation. Though “Big Night” is the most tangible display of the active involvement Nezhukumatathil expects from her reader, an immediacy pervades the more traditional poems as well, imploring the reader to stay alert. Many poems build lists that continue past conventional length, as in the opening poem, “Nocturne for Dark Things,” which ends:
and even on the moon: wide flat plains
are called seas, lakes, and marshes. Bays
are named Joy, named Sorrow, named Hope,
named Nectar, named Softness, named Serpent,
named Stickiness, named Tranquility, named
Clouds, named Sleep, and my favorite—named Love.
The unflinching eleven repetitions of “named” discourages skimming, forcing the reader to notice that each word, with meaning unto itself, is also a name. Nezhukumatathil returns to this long-listing method frequently throughout the collection—listing gods, flowers, endangered bee species—challenging readers’ biases and expanding our understanding as the poet demonstrates both vastness and individuality.
Attention develops into urgency as Nezhukumatathil expresses blunt anger over global and personal injustices. This emphatic tone is heard most clearly in “For Elephant Poachers: An Invective,” a persona poem in the voice of a mother elephant who has been poached and skinned alive:
[ . . . ] Because you skinned me
while I still breathed—because you wanted my skin
for medicine powder and blood beads to trade—my tusks
will shake in the space just behind your eyes when you sleep.
The prose poem “American Tenderness” draws a thread from ecological grief to violence of humans against each other when the speaker says, “I’m one of your only sources of actual, lived experience as a brown woman (again, why is that?) but I’m here to say any violence or harassment towards me and my family was never, ever served to me by someone with brown skin.” These second-person points of view, with very different speakers and voices, haunt the reader with a collective culpability.
But Nezhukumatathil never dwells on anger and grief. Many poems carry enormous wonder and hope, juxtaposing outrage, but with equal insistence. Second-person points of view spawn welcoming immediacy in gratitude poems, sometimes clearly intended for the poet’s beloveds (privileging the reader access to her personal relationships) but also often directed at the reader (embracing the reader as one of her beloveds). In “What I Learned in Greenland” the speaker says, “There are not enough words / in the Kalaallisut language (or any language) / to prepare you for the five hundred shades of blue // in icebergs,” extending the awe of discovery to the reader. “Firefly Ars Poetica” offers grace the reader may not have known they needed when the speaker says, “Do not worry if this is not your season. / It will come. I am certain of it. It will come.” The combination of first and second person here, the speaker’s confidence in the reader, and attention through repetition is intimate, as emphatic as the complementary anger of other poems, and emblematic of the tenderness that permeates much of the collection.
Night Owl takes readers around the world, to U.S. national parks, Mexico, Greenland, and the Philippines. It takes readers through space and time, to other planets where time passes differently than on Earth, in every instance entreating us to pay attention. Perhaps the most tender poem in the collection is “Saturnine,” in which the speaker’s child declares his desire to live on Saturn. The speaker’s serious consideration of this arguably unattainable goal reflects the poet’s ongoing sense of wonder and discovery. But viewing her child’s fanciful dream through the lens of waning motherhood perfectly demonstrates wonder and grief existing side by side. Nezhukumatathil is teaching her readers to hone our focus, as one poem’s title so aptly states, “How to Build a Moon Garden when the News is all Horror.”
Night Owl could be summed up by a line from “Nursery,” in which the speaker says, “I wish for unsolved equations and maps / of the ocean always unfinished.” The speakers in this collection are unabashedly distraught by injustice, their uncensored rage resensitizing the reader to the moral wrongs of racism and ecological harm. But they are equally, and in fact more, filled with awe at nature’s enduring beauty and humanity’s capacity for love, evidenced by the rich diversity of forms, the functional design of free verse, and the spirited and intimate tones that infuse these pages. Nezhukumatathil is finely tuned into wonder and gratitude, which she generously offers to her reader, as if there were more than enough to go around. She remains deeply aware that the purest joys in life come from the unknown, the undiscovered, the unanswered questions, which provide an ongoing call for exploration.
Emily Persichetti Schuster’s poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bluebird Word; Allium, a Journal of Poetry and Prose; and Studio One. She is a contributor to Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny (Elderfly Press, 2026). She is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Spalding University. Emily lives in Athens, Georgia, with her partner and their two kids. Find her on Instagram @empschuster_creative.