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Paperback
Overview
In these gorgeous new poems, Sandra Meek guides us through exquisitely rendered landscapes both terrestrial and emotional, from the deserts and deltas of Sub-Saharan Africa to the bruised terrain of the fragile human heart.
Following her mother's death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek began traveling extensively through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. During this same period, she and her sister also traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living off of fog in a desert studded with landmines, or the sandstone “temples” of Zion National Park, Meek’s poems attend to the endangered as well as the enduring, braiding personal narrative with those of the natural world from which they arise. At once nomadic and deeply rooted to place, An Ecology of Elsewhere interweaves a difficult past (personal and terrestrial) with an uncertain future.
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780892554737 |
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Publisher: | Persea Books |
Publication date: | 05/03/2016 |
Pages: | 120 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Sandra Meek is the author offour books of poems and the editor of an anthology,Deep
Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad. She is the recipient of the
2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Meek iscofounding Editor of Ninebark Press, Poetry Editor of thePhi
Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at
Berry College. She lives in Rome, Georgia.
Table of Contents
Acacia karroo Hayne (White Thorn) 3
River Horse (Hippopotamus amphibious), Okavango Delta 7
Vessel in the Form of a Fantastical Frog 10
The Cost of Soaring Food 12
Why Items Tend to Shift in Flight 13
The Imaginary Heart 14
Kill 19
Aloe dichotoma (Quiver Tree) 25
Skeleton Coast 30
Your Best Exit May Be Behind You 33
Flight Cage 35
Permanent Threshold Shift 40
Colophospermum mopane (Mophane) 42
Acedia 46
Still Life with Adolescent Possum and Midlife Crisis 49
Welwitscbia mirabilis, Namib Desert 51
Neritina virginea 57
Still Life with Paper Wasp Nest and Lava Flow 59
Dead Vlei 63
Ploceus velatus (Southern Masked Weaver), with a Brief Survey of Vermin 65
Bryce Canyon 69
Zion 73
Protea lepidocarpodendron (Black-Bearded Protea) 76
Orycteropus afer (Antbear), Kalahari 82
Postflight Edema 87
Acacia erioloba (Camel Thorn) 90
Adansonia digitata (Baobab) 93
Notes 95
Acknowledgments 103