WINNER OF THE 2023 GRAYSON BOOKS POETRY AWARD
Grayson Books, January 2024, $16.95
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“Readers too will be ‘bruised by tenderness’”
“Poems as clear and mysterious as cold lake water”
About the book:
The poems in Surfacing follow a woman into the wilderness of childbirth and child-rearing as she searches for wholeness in a fracturing world. In the book’s pages, the faces of two boys come swimming up from a block of marble beneath the hands of a 15th century sculptor, the world seems to spring into being as a young couple descends from an icy mountain peak into a lush green valley, and a family grows, child by child by child, in a small suburban house on the edge of a forest. Attuned to both the brevity of existence and life’s insistent pulse, the poems immerse the reader in the mystery and joy of being alive together on this planet.
Excerpt:
Afternoon Sun at the End of Summer
The children wade naked and thigh-deep
in stone-colored water. They duck under
and come up flinging drops from their hair.
Wind raises gooseflesh on their arms.
Touch is the miracle, wrote Whitman.
Touch is the earth’s language and the children
speak it. They revel in it. Wind and water,
and the hard, wave-patterned sand underfoot.
Sound, in its flutter against the inner ear,
and light’s weightless impingement
on the seven receptive layers of the retina.
—originally published in The Georgia Review