How do we know where home is, asks Carol Flake Chapman, when we are always moving away, when the places where we were once rooted have changed, just as we ourselves change? In Querencia: Sonnets on Seeking Home in a Troubled World, she explores our desire to find a sense of belonging and safety in a time when rivers have been drying up, sea levels are rising, the West has been burning, and hurricanes have been getting more frequent and powerful. With a country bitterly divided on so many fronts, finding home has never been more difficult.

She has found the most telling concept of seeking home in this troubled time to be that of querencia, which originated as a term from bullfighting to describe the area in the ring where the bull finds a place of safety. The meaning of querencia has broadened to suggest a feeling of belonging, of finding home. But for the bull, as for most of us, our feelings of safety and belonging are only temporary, as we must often venture out of our safe places, and we must often leave them to seek safety and belonging elsewhere. And from that quest, she suggests in her poems, we create our own places of respite and sanctuary, where we find comfort and meaning.