English Department Faculty Reading Series: Kylan Rice

To kick off National Poetry Month, English Assistant Professor Kylan Rice read from his new poetry book Name and Earth on April 1, 2026, as part of the English Department’s faculty reading series.

The book is an exploration of place. Kylan used a random coordinate generator to visit locations within a specific area. In each spot, he created a survey plot, placed a piece of quartz inside, and took a photo. Kylan’s poems are set in a variety of places, such as an abandoned mobile home, an irrigation ditch, and a cemetery.

Kylan based the size of the sample plots on the constraints of a sonnet. Each plot was 140 cm x 100 cm, corresponding with the 14 ten-syllable lines of a sonnet.

The poems invoke images of bars, a plant identification app, old Norse words, and always plants and quartz.

“I'm excited to have this book out in the world, but also a little bit terrified because it was an exceptionally difficult book to write. The poems in the book cost a lot to make. They record a year in a life at a crossroads,” Kylan says. “I'd like to think of the book as being about the ongoing struggle to belong without struggle to the place where you are, to the life that you live in.”