An Ecology of Elsewhere: Poems

by Sandra Meek

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892554737
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

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/01/2016
Recipient of the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Meek (Road Scatter) weaves travels through Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa to honor her recently deceased mother with trips she took in this country with her sister and ailing father, recalling a sometimes fractured family. What's remarkable is that Meek does not stoop to the journey-as-healing narrative one might expect. Instead, she puts us in panoramic settings that in their bristly, sun-seared particulars represent her brittle emotions; she doesn't take herself (or us) comfortingly out of the world but shows us baby seal hunts and the noble Welwitschia mirabilis, surviving in the brutally arid Namib desert, surrounded by landmines left after Angola's bid for independence and memories of Germans slaughtering the Herero and Nama people in the early 1900s. "What's lost// most remains" she says of dry grass-thorn—and of so much else. VERDICT Meek's lines are dense and challenging but worth every effort. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]

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