Tracy Zeman teaches writing at the University of Michigan and literature in U-M’s remote New England Literature Program. Originally from Illinois, Zeman currently lives outside Detroit with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons. Her new book of poetry is called "Interglacial." 

We're publishing Zeman's poem "Belle Isle" from "Interglacial," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

BELLE ISLE

Across the Detroit River     peregrine
falcon steadies the W
of the Whittier Hotel on East Jefferson
translocal dispersal common loon
in winter plumage     single blur crosshair
walking the ground of ourselves these
material bounds     expose     clefts
in known & whose share of

seawall collapse

On West Jefferson     aggregate pile
river-slip     Revere Copper &
Brass     uranium relict     residual
radiation     worrying     Fort Wayne
Windsor     Grosse Ile     toxic colony
a type of     matter over     man
is or is not the measure
of this ghost ship split

what recovery makes

Meaning for which species
winter wren snag     I saw it sing
near the handball courts
bramble low exposure & bristly
greenbrier     lines built through
unanticipated     merlin mistaken
for kestrel over kingfisher
on Blue Heron Lagoon

gadwall hidden within

Ring-necks & buffleheads
slow the car to watch a fox
devour a black-morphed gray squirrel
then trot into woods
semiotic turn     destruction as investment
as collateral for existence
grass carp European frogbit
or some yielding to

a similar sense of sameness

Leaf veins on wet ice
brown creeper branching     trio
of tree sparrows     rust-cast
concern-record     dark garden
in terms of multiples
carcass sloughed in amber sap
or field note scribble
black-duck sleep     out-sequencing

assemblies & symptoms

*****

Q: Tell us about the poem's creation.
A: The poem "Belle Isle" was crafted from three separate sources. Most winters I visit the island to look for waterfowl and resident winter birds, so all the birds and animals in the poem are species I personally spotted during those visits. Including the fox in the poem! Also, most years, from the island, if you look through a spotting scope, you can see peregrine falcons perching on the Whittier Hotel in downtown Detroit. They nest there. The friction in the poem though comes from a Detroit Free Press article titled "Uranium-contaminated site collapses into Detroit River." This site contained "uranium and other dangerous chemicals" that dated back to manufacturing in the 1940s that had not yet been remediated. Lastly, some of the inspiration came from the phrase "destruction as investment" from poet Ed Roberson. It seems that industrial and extractive industries—especially from previous eras—often have some pollution or destruction as part of their operating model without factoring in downstream effects and environmental damage. So, as is common in many of my poems, some event, some personal observations, and collaged language come together to describe the layers of a specific site as they do here in the poem "Belle Isle," where toxic legacies mingle with the lives of humans and animal-others.

Q: There are a lot of animals mentioned in the poem, but birds are the most prominent and frequent. Tell us about their place in the poem and in Interglacial?
A: Ah the birds! Well, they are my favorite. I started to get into birding about 20 years ago when I was living in Springfield, Illinois. My in-laws bought a finch feeder for me to hang in my first-ever backyard. I slowly noticed that learning about birds can be a gateway to learning about ecosystems. And birding, like writing, I find, is an act of sustained attention, where numerous strands of knowledge kind of come together in a practice of noticing and thinking. To identify what you see, you need to think about plant species, time of year, and where you are geographically. So birds can be a window into place. Also, on a practical level, they are frequently the only animals you see when you are out in nature; many other animals stay hidden. I also think birds have a particular relationship to movement and scale given their migration routes and how small shifts in climate can have cascade effects for different species up and down the trophic column. A goal in my work is to document the shifting present.

Q: I read a blurb about your previous book, Empire, that stated that the book is a "song for what's lost, and all that remains." Your "Belle Isle" poem has this feeling, too, with all the human-made detritus encroaching on the land even as the animals try to exist in their habitats. Your poem touches on this tension, but there's still a deeply meditative quality about the piece. There are notes of death threaded throughout, but the poem is also abundant with living things. Would you talk about that, and if it's a theme that runs through your other work, too?
A: Yes, the human-made detritus, extant animals, and meditative qualities are all hallmarks of my work. And death! In my first book, the focus was often on expansive landscapes, like grasslands, as depicted in texts about the Midwest during the colonial era. However, Interglacial is much more centered in the recent industrial past, so "third-place" landscapes are much more common in these poems—places where there is a mix of the human-built and the natural with both humans and other species occupying the same sites. And these are in fact the spaces most of us inhabit every day. Knowing that the wild is everywhere in a way can be revelatory. Regarding death, I think it's my way of working through the moral and ethical conundrums of living through this time of anthropocentric ecological unraveling. What will it mean when many of the symbols and other species we've evolved with become extinct? What does it mean for us? And what does it mean for the lifeways of those species? Those ways of knowing and living in the world have value both for those species and for ours.

Q: In 2027, you'll be going to the Arctic Circle, and this 2026 Ann Arbor winter has been assisting you in preparing for the trip. What's the impetus behind this journey with scientists and other artists?
A: I've been reading and writing about climate change for about 20 years now, and that reading usually includes changes happening at the planet's poles, so I've long been interested in visiting those landscapes. My poetic practice depends upon somatic experiences in actual places. The poles are changing more rapidly than other places, and the changes there are already affecting us, for example, arctic systems that get pushed south giving us these intense storms and intensely cold temperatures. As many poets do, I try to create poetic forms that have a relationship with the content and landscapes of the places I'm writing about. Empire, my first book, was written in square plots—in my mind, reminiscent of the parceled land plots and gridded roads of the Midwest and West. Interglacial has a two-track form that plays, I hope, with ideas of time and scale. In the glaciated landscapes of the Great Lakes region deep time can often be seen at the surface. I imagine that my polar poems will be longer-lined like the Arctic horizon and low vegetation yet broken by some kind of interruptions—pelagic birds, ice, waves. I'm excited to see what happens!

Q: Please recommend three poetry books.
A: I recommend any of Craig Santos Perez's books from his from unincorporated territory, perhaps starting with the first book [hacha] or the last book [åmot]. These books depict aspects of Guam's complicated history through collage, tracing natural species, its colonizers and war histories, and stories of indigenous Chamorro people.

I recommend Lorine Niedecker—either her Collected Works or a selected works. A Wisconsin poet, she's a master of brevity, choice words, and clever turns. Her poem "Lake Superior" is a favorite.

And lastly, I just bought this book in recent weeks, Brandon Kilbourne's Natural History. He is a biologist and a poet. One of the book's themes is the fraught origins of natural history and its entanglements with slavery and empire, human-caused species extinctions, but also wonder and beauty. 

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp. 

Kelly Hoffer, Tracy Zeman, and Kameryn Alexa Carter read at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Wednesday, February 18, at 6:30 pm.

Related:
➥ "Slash and Burn: Kelly Hoffer finds care and destruction in her new poetry collection, 'Fire Series'" [Pulp, February 16, 2026]"
➥ "University of Michigan MFA student Kameryn Alexa Carter discusses her poem 'Whoso list to hunt'" [Pulp, February 16, 2026]"