In The Odyssey, there is no blue, just a sea as rich as wine, as red/as blood, our transgressions present as carbon dioxide/ trapped in ice and how we weep for blue whales/ their dark bodies gliding through dark water, songs as alien/ as static caught by rotating satellites, data we circle/ on mimeographed pages, each unknown, both wails light years away.
Order Phrasebook for the Common Era from Quarterly West.
To be dissolved in this liminal space/is not so far from melting. Whether ice/or shore-wrecked ships, a slipping/landmass, small whales along shore,/or silver koi, we all return
to water/edges lapping every closer.
Order Frost & Thaw from Red Bird Chapbooks.
See: “Attraction;” See: “A Woman,” not “A Wanton Fish”
1. Marsh light 2. near the river, the glow all green and shimmering outside of docks. Twitchy, wishing, this spirit of a fisher, a creel at her feet bountied and plumb, bursting with the slick one wet and thrashing 3.To be tempted is to falter. She is not goddess, nor temptress, not Calliope in the stars; she is muddied and foul, a bird-watcher, a collector of shells, a set of hands wrist deep into grit, a puller of clams from the shore, pry fingers and grasping, shifting, her hair worn above her ears smeared with ink, the leftover 4. Gather and sacrifice this brackish creature, her breasts affright, tightened against her chest, her feet a rushing, all parts outside, she nothing but a ghost against the beached boards, driftwood knocking her ankles and legs 5. See: “Halocline” 6. See: “A collision of sweet to salt.”
Order ferox femina from {dancing girl press}.
Like a salty cold ocean, the way of smell, hard in your mouth/and down your throat, the fins of whales
Order Qikiqtagruk: Almost an Island from Red Bird Chapbooks.
You consider apple pie moonshine/her foot so clean and white, glowing/as it slid through the mud, everything acidic on your tongue/beneath crop dusters and on this runway you imagine/floods, water hissing along the asphalt/the way everything must always rise/mosquitoes in your ears and everything combustible/in the summer night lying along the tarmac
Order Everything Combustible from {dancing girl press}.
I want to tell you about sinking ships—Andrea Doria, Monitor, RMS Rhone./ I want to tell you about black holes, twenty million bats in darkness./ We never see bats. We go to Frenchman’s Flat and sit on the rocks but the water/ is cold. Instead of swimming we lie on the stones, prone to light.
Praise for The Pine Effect
“Andrea Spofford has made emotion science, and science emotion..These transcendently wise poems…converse with astronomy, ecology, meteorology, seismology, zoology; they leap into the adulterated mix.” —Angela Ball, Author of Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds
“Andrea Spofford’s debut collection is an engaging eco-poetical Bildungsroman in which Nancy Drew becomes a verb, traversed geographies stretch from hippodromes to sandstone caves, and vantage points move from the naturalist’s eye to the panoramic gaze of an explorer compelled by the personal histories of place. Spofford’s meticulous and striking images lead us to want to hear about it all.” —Rebecca Morgan Frank, Author of Little Murders Everywhere
“Andrea Spofford’s voice is by turns headlong and meticulous, urgent and careful… Spofford’s lines are more than gorgeous: they blur and clarify, growl and sing…[her] first book is paroxysmal, breathless, and beautiful, teeming with flame and shadow.”—William Wright, Series Editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Author of Tree Heresies
“Andrea Spofford’s aptly titled collection The Pine Effect is at once like taking a guided walk into a ‘crest of tumble,’ ‘field full’ and, as if in a ‘Tennessee quilt,’ you are transfixed by the mysterious beauty of language–surprising and sharp, marked by precision and originality. Spofford’s poems teach you how to live in this world again or for the first time…” —Julia Johnson, Author of The Falling Horse
Order The Pine Effect from Red Paint Hill Press.
Read more at Chapter 16 or find me on Goodreads.
Andrea Spofford 