In Parachutes Descending

What makes this book so striking is the narrators’ determination to shift the rules and norms of our culture, our society, our world.

* Apalachee Review *

Only Tana Jean Welch can pull off a poem that is simultaneously meditative, etymologically curious, and predicated on a dad-joke worthy pun.

* LitHub *

Tana Jean Welch’s In Parachutes Descending is a palimpsest oscillating between lovers and coastlines, backlit by the tragic absurdities of the Anthropocene. These poems are a ship’s log of geographical losses and ecstasies, an erotic map of floating cities orbited by flesh-eating mermaids, soiled grand pianos, and every form of bare infinitive.

-- Simeon Berry, author of Monograph

In her second collection, In Parachutes Descending,Tana Jean Welch deftly moves through the climate crisis and human connection. Her rich language, a sexuality turned inward, closes the distance between civilization and its ecology. This collection will brighten your mind and sharpen the space between the individual and the infinite.

-- Avni Vyas, author of Little God

In a world that treats bodies too often as commodities, Tana Jean Welch offers a counter perspective that insists on the interconnectedness of all living—and nonliving—beings. Through precise, image-centered language, In Parachutes Descending is that rare poetry book that offers not only a critique but a vision, too.

-- Charlotte Pence, author of Code

The poems of Tana Jean Welch’s In Parachutes Descending float between fact and possibility, destruction and passion, introspection and challenge, between the bodies we create together—lovingly, disastrously, rupturingly, rapturously—and the bodies we dwell in alone.

-- Lauren Russell, author of Des