Robert Frost was Vermont’s first poet laureate, appointed to the position in 1961. While the official task of a poet laureate is to promote the reading and writing of poetry across their state, the work produced by appointees often serves the additional purpose of documenting the ineffability of a place and time in a way that only poetry can. The Near and Distant World by Bianca Stone—Vermont’s poet laureate for the 2024–2028 term—does just that.
Stone crafts poems that traverse snowy mountains, coffee shop readings, lectures and writing conferences. She contrasts New England’s cold landscape with academic interiors brimming with analytical references that manage to feel cozy—in a tweed-jacket-with-elbow-pads kind of way. These contemplative lyrics make the troubles of a turbulent world feel distant, giving the reader space to wrestle with philosophy, myth and language.
Like another Vermont poet laureate, Louise Gluck, Stone explores classical allusions to make sense of the contemporary world. Ovid, Faust, Freud—each provides lenses through which to look at language. Stone evokes Lacan with images like “buttering the toast with a machete” that play with an object’s assumed symbolic meaning. Contemplating the “anxiety of meaning” and its relationship to poetry is the heart of this book. She confesses that “All poets are liars, / wrecked against meaning, starved / on the beach of meaning.”
While Stone seems frustrated with the cerebral tensions of Western theory, she locates a purity in the expressions of nature. “Objectless wind” finds its way into every nook and cranny of this collection. Wind overcomes Stone’s limitations with words and writing: It can create artful sounds without the burden of intent or meaning. Stone prophesies nature ultimately “deconstructing” the canon, when “all the books will swell and warp / and have to be thrown out” in the wake of climate disaster.
In The Near and Distant World, Stone’s love for poetry is not mere celebration, but a deep reflection on its “bitter-sweet suicidal explosions,” a hunt for its beautiful, bloody heart.
Check out more selections for Poetry Month 2026.
