The poems in Zoë Ryder White's debut full-length poetry collection, The Visible Field, live in the space between the mind's internal life and the body's external world. Meditative and expansive, quiet and joyous, these poems listen and look past the surface of things. Traversing Emily Dickinson's flowers, the inevitability of potholes, the many uses of nitrogen, and other subjects, this wide-reaching collection approaches the world with an unending sense of marvel. Linking the domestic and the natural, the body and the field, the visible and what's beyond visible, White's poems make the reader ecstatically glad to be alive. Pay attention, they urge, and we do.

Zoë Ryder White (she/her) has had poems appearing in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press' Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook HYPERSPACE was the editors' choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring with Nicole Callihan. Another collaboration with Nicole, Elsewhere, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, White edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.

"The Visible Field moves with boundless enthusiasm for each moment's last burnishing. These poems let you curl into a space you didn't know existed yet somehow expected. Let's call it the visible field of imagination. Zoë Ryder White knows how to get there. She writes, 'The people in me keep me / up late talking, sometimes / laughing, carrying on.' Every line is a chance to be curious by 'the world, shucked, the world / inside the world.'" — Lauren Camp, author of An Eye in Each Square

"Zoë Ryder White's poems are strong and vital and astonishingly satisfying—and they are satisfying not only in their ease of movement from the real world to the symbolic one, their genius for metaphoric transformation, the narrative verve they display, their deep, visually alert representations of nature, their rhetorical keenness and toughness, but also, and most vitally, in their psychological transparency and intimacy. A spectacular book that can be read and read and read again." — Vijay Seshadri, author of That Was Now, This Is Then and winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"The Visible Field pays such careful attention to the physical world that it cannot help but expose its concealments. How does this concealment change us? As the poet notes in the opening of 'Interview': 'The fish, when split, had a belly full of plastic, but it was still a fish.' The hollows of the body, the pockets of dresses, vaults, 'I am inside these birds,' Zoë Ryder White writes in one poem; the 'dim rooms' inside a plum that has yet to come to fruition—all these are spaces of containment. In these poems we see that in dealing with attention to the world's physicality, one is always dealing with the possibility of hiddenness. The body itself might be the greatest and most tactile representation of all that exists between flesh and consciousness, vessel and seed: 'When I was an envelope, I enclosed / a red scrap,' White writes with her subtle grace. In The Visible Field, we see that the book itself is a casing which hides within itself a field of study: of a life, with its landscapes, children, friends and memories and confinements. Here is hidden vision, given to us by a specific poet, whose eye is generous and playful, who coaxes the readers to question the messiness of the whole business of language. 'To read out of order / is to arrange one's affection / deliberately,' one poem posits in its dissolution of the object of a book. I will continue to ponder the idiosyncratic wisdoms of these poems." — Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World