NOCTUARY, C. Rees,92 pg., $20, paperback, Host Publications, 2026, Reviewed by Bianca Alyssa Pérez
There are books of poetry that ask to be read, & there are books that ask to be entered. C. Rees’s NOCTUARY, published by Austin’s Host Publications, is the latter: a haunted, river-dark, fiercely alive collection that moves through the chambers of memory, family, landscape, history, & the body. The book is an elegy, but it is also an ecology. It is a séance, an archive, a field guide, a family album, & a record of what refuses to stay buried. Rees writes toward what it means to remain alive among the dead’s resurrected traces.
The title itself offers the key. A noctuary is an archaic term for an account of what happens at night, “the negative of diaries.” Rees’s poems inhabit that negative space: the hours when memory becomes porous, when houses remember their former occupants, when rivers carry names, & when the natural world seems to speak in the language of omen. The collection is divided into three movements—“NIGHT JOURNEY,” “STASIMON,” & “A PRIOR HAUNTING”—& the architecture feels deliberately theatrical & ritualistic. “STASIMON,” Rees explains in the book’s notes, refers to the stationary chorus of Greek tragedy, the chorus that pauses the action to comment, contextualize, & lament. That is precisely what this collection does. It stands inside the wreckage of things & sings.
What I found most moving about NOCTUARY is the way Rees refuses to separate personal grief from environmental grief, family history from regional history, or the body from the land. The Delaware River becomes both a literal geography & an ancestral archive. Water is never simply water. It is memory, burial, inheritance, contamination, passage. In “Ecology of Grieving,” the speaker tells an uncle that no matter how often he is called “up from death,” he cannot join the living on shore. Elsewhere, the river carries names, bodies, plastic forks, fish, industrial waste, & family histories. In “Crossing,” the river becomes “the lineage of water,” while the dead become “a species / who grow & shrink.”
The lineage of water…that phrase feels central to the entire collection. Rees understands lineage as something fluid, contaminated, & continually changing shape to the space/time it exists in. This is one of the places where the collection felt especially resonant to me as a poet. I am drawn to poetry that understands inheritance as something we carry in the body but also something we must continually revise: the stories we receive, the silences we pass down, the landscapes that formed us, & the ghosts we discover inside our own language. NOCTUARY makes that inheritance physical. It gets under the fingernails & pulls.
The poems in this collection are often lush without becoming ornamental. Rees has an extraordinary ability to make the natural world beautiful & terrible in the same breath. Trees, foxes, hawks, trout, cicadas, moths, rabbits, wasps, poplars, moss, milkweed, bloodroot, & rivers populate these pages, but nature is never merely scenic. The nonhuman world becomes a chorus of witnesses. In “Séance,” a dead hawkmoth & a barred owl become occasions for the question, “Who died?” The question is devastating because the collection has already taught us that death is not singular. Something is always dying alongside us: a person, a place, a species, a version of childhood, a family story, a piece of land.
Rees’s relationship to place is equally complicated. The poems are rooted in Pennsylvania & New Jersey, particularly the Delaware River Valley & the landscape of New Hope, but they continually expose the violence beneath the idea of “home.” The collection explicitly acknowledges Lenape & other Indigenous peoples whose lands have been occupied & transformed by settler development. The poet’s own notes trace the histories of place names, stolen land, suburban expansion, & ecological destruction. This gives the poems an important ethical tension: nostalgia to a particular place is never allowed to become truly innocent; it is nuance encapsulated.
That tension also makes the collection’s treatment of family so powerful. These poems love their dead without sanitizing them. Fathers, mothers, grandparents, uncles, siblings, neighbors, & friends appear as complicated people—sometimes tender, sometimes violent, sometimes damaged, sometimes unknowable. In “Our Familiar Spirit,” a grandfather’s grief is held beside the image of a crow sitting on three sterile chicken eggs. The poem refuses to call this hope too easily. Instead, it says, “If it is too much / to say that this crow hoped,” perhaps he simply did not eat the eggs. That restraint is one of Rees’s greatest strengths. The poems know that sometimes the smallest gesture carries more emotional weight than an explanation ever could.
I was especially struck by how often Rees lets syntax become a form of haunting. Lines fracture, words stretch apart, phrases repeat, punctuation disappears, & images accumulate until the poem begins to feel like a nervous system receiving too much information at once. This is poetry that understands fragmentation as a form of truth. Grief rarely arrives in complete sentences. Memory rarely proceeds chronologically. The past leaks.
That formal porousness is part of what makes NOCTUARY feel alive. Rees’s poems repeatedly move between registers: myth & pop culture, scripture & pornography, family photographs & ecological catastrophe, Greek tragedy & suburban development. The result is a poetics of collision. Nothing stays in its assigned category.
Perhaps that is ultimately what NOCTUARY is asking us to understand: that categories such as living & dead, human & animal, past & present, body & landscape are far more permeable than we pretend. Rees describes their own work as contending with “contamination & complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, & porousness,” & that description feels like a map of the book itself.
The collection’s final gesture is not an end stop but a continuation. In the acknowledgments, Rees writes to the dead, “I will continue to seek you out.” That sentence feels like the book’s deepest promise. Poetry cannot bring the dead back. Rees knows this. But poetry can keep looking. It can keep listening. It can carry a name across water. It can place a hand against the dark & feel for warmth.
NOCTUARY is a book about what remains after the fire, after the funeral, after the river has carried the body away. It is about the residue of love. It is about the strange persistence of the landscape inside us. This collection is about how the dead continue to alter the living—not by returning as ghosts, necessarily, but by becoming language, image, gesture, story, weather, etc.,
This is a beautifully unsettling book. It does not ask Grief (yes, capital G Grief) to become beautiful. It invites us to look closely enough to see that grief already contains its own strange beauty: a river carrying light, a dead moth in a mailbox, foxes bruised by exhaust, a grandmother’s hands, a crow sitting on eggs that will never hatch. In Rees’s hands, the poem becomes the place where these things can remain together.
Perhaps that is what poetry does at its best: it makes a home for what cannot return home.
NOCTUARY is that home—dark, breathing, haunted, & still full of light.
