Tread Upon

Christopher Kondrich 

Forthcoming April 2026

Cover Design by Gopa and Ted2, Inc. Cover Art by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place,” the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.

Paperback: $17.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556597244

Format: Paperback

from Tread Upon

Little whir of the laptop to keep it
from overheating. Little wind from the lid

of the trash can falling shut. I tossed in
the receipt, a little crumpled slip

of thermal paper that cannot be recycled
because it contains a chemical 

that disrupts brain development, hormone production.
The receipt is evidence of what I bought

and where and how I paid
with the labor of others. Hands completing

a single task repeatedly. Vertebrae of a spine
curled over for fourteen-hour shifts.

I paid with those hands, those spines, debited them
from my account. Bank of America

wants me to know that I’ve earned a credit line
increase. Amazon informs me that I’ve been a customer

since 2003. Is it still considered knowledge
if it doesn’t change you? 

About the Author

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and The Yale Review, and he has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. He is also …

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Praise for Christopher Kondrich

“In his elegant and meditative poems, Kondrich reflects on how we assign value, how we evaluate what is worthy, useful, and necessary.”—Judges’ Citation for The Believer Book Award

“‘I choose to love / as asylum from that which presses me / to hate,’ says the opening poem of Valuing, a rich and vital book by Christopher Kondrich. Lines like these are quite apropos in such a philosophical work of art in which Kondrich questions and embraces both God and pessimism, all the while trying to establish a self—a being worth more than what late capitalism can allow—by chanting what seems like spells born before anyone was born: ‘Also, I must capture you in song. I must find music to set to this / aging and follow the river to my death.’ There is not space enough for me to write all I love about this book and its potential for influence on poetry and on any mind made vulnerable to poetry.”—Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tradition