Afloat: 2025 (The Birdy Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Anderson, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 195657882X ISBN 13: 9781956578829

Publisher: Meadowlark, 2025

Synopsis

In Afloat, Catherine Anderson inspects the world around her with the detail of a scientist, the imagery of a painter, and the introspection of a philosopher. Through frequently “quotidian” scenarios—learning to knit, cutting rhubarb, purchasing flowers at the grocery store—Anderson ruminates on themes of love, spirituality, and justice, celebrating the beauty and wonder around us but not shying away from the loss and pain that so often accompany them. These poems saint all they touch—feather dancers, bell ringers, rubber pastries, tardigrades—revealing the holy in the everyday and the profound ties that connect us to each other, the natural world, and all that has come before.

Winner of the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize by Meadowlark Press.

About this title

About the Author

Catherine Anderson has published four collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters. Learn more about Catherine at www.catherineanderson.uno

Edition details

• Publisher: Meadowlark
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 195657882X
• ISBN 13: 9781956578829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 114