Embodying a rainbow of emotions, the poetry of Paschold grounds the reader to the world around them and those that inhabit it, big and small.

—Joel Sartore Photography – Office Staff

The poems in Human Nature offer a stunning and tender ecology. It’s impossible to turn away from the awe and beauty, even as the poems also engage in playfulness and grief and resistance. In these deeply spiritual poems, the body is intricately bound to the natural world. As readers of this work, we can feel both the immense power and smallness of our human hands trembling in each shimmering line.

—Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography

Julie Paschold takes a bold swing right in the title of her collection Human Nature, the delineation of which has been the prime ambition of literary folks since the first someone put pen to paper. Even, or especially, when “[w]e thin-skinned hairless beings” look outside ourselves at spiders and crocodile icefish, we also hold up a mirror in order to study our own reflection. Who can’t at times identify with “a prairie vole,/ popcorn of the prairie,/ . . . everything is out to eat me”? And it’s not just our fellow critters we see ourselves in: Even “[t]he sky has a sliver caught in her thumb.” It’s this commonality which drives the poems and helps us understand where and how we fit in.

—JV Brummels, author of All the Live-Long Day

Julie S. Paschold (Tansy Julie the Soaring Eagle) is a poet and artist from Nebraska. They have their BS and MS in agronomy from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Their first book, Horizons (Atmosphere Press) is a collection of poetry honoring soil, one of our nonrenewable resources. Their poetry chapbook You Have Always Been Here (Bass Clef Books) is an unconventional love story. Julie has been published in a wide range of publications. Their poem “Multitudes of Blue Arrows” was a semi-finalist in the first Kate Sommers Memorial Prize in 2023, and two of their chapbooks won honorable mention in contests by Writer’s Digest in 2021 and 2022. They also volunteer for the international Human Library Organization. For more information, read their blog on jpaschold.medium.com or visit their author website at jpaschold.blogspot.com.

Human Nature
Julie S. Paschold
Perfect Paperback: 136 pages
WSC Press (2025) $16
ISBN: 979-8-9892196-5-0